by F. G. Cottam
John fixed himself a cappuccino and joined Curtis at his table. He picked two lumps of brown sugar from a small bowl heaped with them and stirred. He said, ‘Couldn’t help you with any of that. But I know a man who might be able to.’
Curtis smiled. John wasn’t a creature of the Internet age. He was unaware that anyone with a laptop and broadband could access information about virtually anything just by tapping a couple of key words into Google. He wasn’t stupid. He was just old school when it came to arcane knowledge. He was the sort who got on the butcher’s bike he rode, pedalled off to a reference library and looked up his facts about fish and fowl in a book.
‘Chap who comes in here mid-afternoon most weekdays,’ he said, ‘semi-retired professor. He does a bit of lecturing at Kingston University and he’s from here originally, but he was at Oxford when he worked full-time. He was chair of something.’
‘Really? Chair of what?’
‘Blowed if I can remember.’
‘It might be geology, John. It might be astro-physics.’
‘It’s something to do with history, because he knows about paganism and Celtic myths, all that stuff.’
‘How do you know he does?’
‘You know how I know. I talk to my customers. I was talking to him only yesterday about Stonehenge.’
‘Know much about Stonehenge?’
‘I didn’t. I do now. He certainly does.’ John stood. ‘Andrew Carrington,’ he said.
‘Professor Carrington to you,’ Curtis said. He drained his cup.
‘I’ve got his card behind the counter, Tom. Give him a ring.’
‘I can’t cold-call an elderly academic and then interrogate him because I’m curious about some remote Welsh wilderness.’
‘Yes, you can. He likes talking. When I see him this afternoon, I’ll tell him to expect you to call.’
It was how John operated. He made connections. To him, the world was a genial, intimate place without much decorum beyond a please and a thank you when you ordered your food at the counter. It had made his café a very popular place with its regular clientele.
Curtis tucked the card into his wallet, thinking it was an authority in family law he really needed to be recommended and not some elderly bloke inclined to bang on about Neolithic Britain. He hefted the bag, which was canvas and wet and quite heavy with the weight of the stacks of notes it held, secure in their rubber bands. He’d bank the money in Surbiton on his way to the station. It was just after half nine in the morning and the shops and offices on Victoria Street would be open for business now.
Two hours later he was about to leave his flat in Lambeth, having packed everything he thought he might need. Now he felt strong enough to read the letter from his daughter folded in his pocket. He took it, tore open the envelope and went and sat on his bed to read it.
Dear Daddy,
I hope you are happy and not sad like the last time I saw you when you cried but I had to write this letter, Daddy, because I am worried about you. I am worried because of the dream I keep having when you are being chased by the spooky trees and they don’t catch you because you escape down the very steep hill to the beach.
The beach is not safe in the dream. It is dark on the pebbles and the sky is dark and there is a monster living there.
Do you remember last summer when we were all still living in the same house and Mummy went to China for a job and you took me to the seaside on our holidays? The beach there was full of pretty shells and we paddled and you made sandcastles and I trampled them down.
There was nothing scary. Except for the big crabs in buckets on the pier, which were a bit scary but not very.
In my dream, Daddy, everything is scary. The sea is red and has a disease and monsters live on the beach. And the trees are spooky and alive and they have crunchy voices like leaves when your feet swish through them but they say actual words.
Please, please stay away from the place in my dream, Daddy. Please promise me that you will.
With All My Love,
Charlotte
Dora Straub wasn’t in Hamburg. She was on the Isle of Wight, booked into the Hamboro Hotel in Ventnor by a successful British film actor with a house in Bonchurch Village.
Dora thought Bonchurch very English in a Rupert Brooke sort of way. The film actor thought so too. He had endured a deprived English childhood on a slum estate in Manchester, and his charming old house with its spacious grounds in a twee village on Wight was his reward to himself for overcoming the setbacks of his impoverished youth.
Dora was there because of his oak trees. There were eight of them in his garden and they had been planted by the original occupant, a sea captain employed by the East India Company in the middle of the eighteenth century, not long after he’d had the house built.
One of the trees had been attacked by a fungal parasite. The actor’s regular gardener had not seen anything like it before. He had not known whether the tree could be saved. He had not known about the risk of this fungus spreading to the oaks neighbouring the afflicted tree. He had said they needed a specialist and so they approached her.
The outcome was a happy one. They had summoned her in time. The fungus was virulent and spread rapidly but oaks were strong trees – stubborn survivors – and she had been able to eradicate the parasite without doing fatal damage to the host.
‘How did you hear about me?’
‘Robert, my gardener, read the profile piece in the National Trust magazine. After you did that work at Hampton Court?’
‘Your gardener has a good memory for names.’
‘More for faces, I’d have thought,’ he said. ‘There can’t be many tree experts who look like you do.’
She left the compliment unremarked upon.
She was packed and ready to leave. She had the actor’s gratitude and his cheque tucked into her wallet. But it was only ten in the morning and her flight from Portsmouth back to Hamburg didn’t leave until eight that evening.
The actor had lent her a bicycle. He’d said that she should see Blackgang Chine. It was part of a coastal walk called the Tennyson Trail. In the event, she cycled the length of the coast road, past the Chine to her left and then Brightstone Forest to her right, all the way to Freshwater Bay, where she stopped at a beach-side café, bought a Diet Pepsi and smoked a cigarette, sipping her drink while she pondered the proposal she had received by email two days earlier from Tom Curtis.
Dora wanted to fuck Tom Curtis. She’d wanted to do that since first meeting him, four years earlier, when they’d worked together restoring an ancient apple orchard on the island of Jersey. The apples had been of a unique variety. The job had been successful. The orchard, after their intervention, flourished. But she hadn’t fucked Tom because he had been in a relationship and, though she’d made it quite clear she wanted to, he’d made it equally clear that he didn’t fool around.
Since then, she knew he had fooled around. And he’d been caught. And as a consequence, he was no longer in a relationship. He was single and available and even if that had not been the case, she thought the job he’d described in his email intriguing enough to become a part of. It was lucrative. It was ambitious and it was vastly bigger than anything she’d done before.
The climb up the coast road was steep to the cliffs before the descent into the bay, and hard pedalling had left Dora thirsty. She drank another Diet Pepsi and smoked a second cigarette then wandered down to the beach, thinking that the bike the actor had lent her would be perfectly safe in such a quaint little seaside spot, left unlocked against the painted railings outside the café.
She strolled, enjoying the spring sunshine, a solitary figure, slim and athletic-looking in shorts and a cotton sweater, alone because the season had not begun and there were no holidaymakers to crowd the beach as there would be when July and August came. She enjoyed the smell of the sea and the sound the shingle made crunching under her feet. She picked up a pebble absently and paused by the clear water filling a rock pool a few feet
from where the waves broke.
She could arrange a sabbatical. She had just completed a paper and its publication would give her academic reputation fresh impetus even in her absence from the university. They encouraged her fieldwork and the project Curtis had described was prestigious in its scale and had impressive environmental integrity. She could monitor her students’ work. Computers facilitated distance learning.
A crab danced across the rock bed of the pool. It looked weightless, its segmented limbs delicate and its shell still translucent with immaturity. Dora remembered the pebble in her hand. She opened her hand and looked at it. It was shiny and veined green against dark grey, about the size of a squash ball.
She held it poised above the pool, dropped it and watched it strike the crab squarely, then saw its shell crack and, as the water settled after the splash, saw the creature’s blood rise through it, trailing and viscous.
Other crabs emerged all at once from under their ledges and leaves of sea cabbage, scenting the wound. And they tumbled through the water in their hurry to devour their damaged brother.
Or sister, Dora mused, watching the feeding frenzy with a slight smile. Did crabs have a gender? She wasn’t sure. She was sure, now, that they were cannibalistic, but she’d suspected that already.
She turned her back on the rock pool and took her iPhone out of the pocket of her shorts. She would text her acceptance of the job Tom Curtis had offered her. She was quite tempted to phone him, for the pleasure of hearing his voice, knowing now that it belonged to a man ready to be courted and seduced. But that was a treat she would wait for. Anticipation was part of the thrill. And anyway, texting her decision was the modern way of doing things.
Sarah Bourne went to fetch Charlotte from her sleepover at eleven o’clock. She drove the two-mile distance in the rain. Her meeting with Tom had left her feeling more bruised and melancholy than she would have predicted. She had promised herself that she would never use Charlie as a pawn in any sort of game. She had promised him that she wouldn’t, either. She was still able to convince herself that she hadn’t done so, that her behaviour was reasonable, but it was an argument with flaws she was quite painfully aware of.
She had thought herself immune from pain. The theoretical possibility that bad things could happen – a terminal illness, a fatal car accident – was something she’d lived with in the same way everyone did. But she had taken care of her health and cherished her daughter, and built a successful career that had given her a degree of financial independence that meant nothing she couldn’t handle was going to turn up as a nasty surprise unless she was really very unlucky indeed.
She’d been content with her lot – with their lot – until the phone call of the previous September arrived like a wrecking ball out of the blue.
Tom’s affair was over by then. Spite prompted the call from the girl he had slept with and then, in her words, abandoned. She wanted him punished. She calculated, correctly, that she could do the greatest harm to him by informing the woman he shared his life with in some detail about the specifics of the betrayal.
Sarah paused with her finger on the bell button outside the house in which her daughter had stayed the night. Charlie would be happy and oblivious, playing with Alice, her best friend from school. Alice’s mother Jenny might be baking them fairy cakes. She shuddered at the memory of her autumnal caller; at the shrill insistence of the girl’s voice and the relentless, unwelcome detail it had documented over the phone.
Jenny opened the door, one of those bright, attractive mums who were all Cath Kidston and Jo Malone, seemingly carefree and really very Kingston indeed. And the smile Sarah gave her seemed painted on as she thought about the suffering her broken heart was forcing her to inflict on Tom. Though ‘forcing’ was wrong, she knew, because it implied a lack of choice. And she was doing what she was doing quite deliberately.
She went inside. Charlie and Alice were in the dining room, drawing pictures on pads with coloured crayons at the large table there, under a window through which the rainy garden provided a grey spring light.
‘Did you post my letter to Daddy?’ Her daughter said this without looking up from what she was doing.
‘I did post it, darling,’ she said, thinking that it was her first lie of the day and, like most lies, would probably lead to more later.
‘When will he get it?’
‘Very soon, I should think.’
‘Will he read it straight away?’
‘I should think so, darling, if he knows it came from you.’
‘Good.’
‘Have you had a lovely time?’
‘Yes.’
Charlie still hadn’t looked at her mother. Sarah walked across to see what it was that was claiming her daughter’s attention. Charlie could draw. She had drawn an armour-clad figure holding the dripping head of some decapitated beast. The beast was ugly and its eyes wore a pale, lifeless gaze.
‘Lovely,’ she said. She looked at Jenny, who was standing next to her with her head tilted and her eyes wide, staring as she was at the image on the pad.
‘Nothing to do with me,’ Jenny said. ‘They went nowhere near the computer. They watched Madagascar Three before bed.’
‘What’s that you’ve drawn, darling?’
‘Just a knight in shining armour.’
‘What’s he holding?’
‘That’s the monster. One of the monsters.’
‘The knight looks like your dad.’
‘A bit,’ Charlie said.
Sarah studied the picture more closely. There was a cowled background figure she noticed, vaguely drawn. ‘Who’s the person in the hood?’
‘She’s not a person, mummy. She’s the lady.’
‘You can’t see her very clearly.’
‘She doesn’t want to be seen at all.’
Sarah laughed. The laughter sounded fraudulent, even to her own ears. To Jenny, she said, ‘My daughter has a lurid imagination.’ She didn’t know why she said it. She didn’t for a moment believe it to be true.
For the second time, he read the piece in the day’s Telegraph about the splitting into two of the ice field close to the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. The split had been made inevitable by shrinkage. Global warming was to blame, evidently.
Andrew Carrington grimaced and swallowed beer. It would all be OK in the end, with this climate change thing, wouldn’t it? They would build a few more of those useless wind turbines that blighted the English countryside in the simplistic belief that green energy could somehow tip the balance.
He folded the newspaper into four on his table. He grunted and shifted on his hip, fishing for change, and felt a flare of arthritis burn brightly through the joint. Sod it, he thought, he’d have another pint. It was not yet midday but they opened for a reason at eleven, and after a couple he’d nap and feel better when he took his four o’clock constitutional down to the promenade and a light bite of something at the Riverside Café.
He had no lectures to give and no seminars to take, and the day stretched forlorn and emptily before him. To make matters worse it was raining steadily from a sky that was uniformly grey. Would sunnier weather lift his mood? He thought it might. But the business with the Kilimanjaro ice field was depressing. It was a portent. It signified something serious that the world would blithely ignore. It would take more than a clear sky to raise his spirits today.
He decided against another pint. Instead he stood stiffly, nodded a farewell to the landlord and reached for his raincoat from the row of hooks by the door. He placed his hat on his head and went outside, nostalgic suddenly for his own past when pubs meant Oxford snugs where a man could converse with knowledgeable colleagues and fill a leisurely pipe and enjoy smoking it without breaking a ridiculous law.
Through the rain, on the other side of the road, he recognized one of his students hurrying along in a parka, a watch-cap pulled down to protect his elaborately-razored hair from the rain.
One of his ridiculous students, he thought, n
ostalgic again, this time for the old days when higher education wasn’t a universal right imposed by the government to massage down youth unemployment figures. As recently as the eighties you had to be clever to qualify for a university place. The dullard over the road was living proof that this was no longer the case.
Professor Carrington limped and laboured up Kingston Hill towards his home. He wondered whether the trap he had set in the garden would present him with a captive. If he was lucky it would deliver a song bird. He hoped for something small and exquisite, something brightly feathered and febrile with anxious life. Twice now, squirrels had forced their inquisitive way into his clever mesh labyrinth. One had been young and manageable. But the other had been mature and strong and he had been obliged to free it.
He reached his home and unlatched the back gate. A finch resolved itself from a bright blue flutter into a living creature as he progressed through his dripping avenue of cypress trees towards the rear of his garden. The bird had evidently exhausted itself in its efforts to escape confinement. It did not attempt to take flight on his approach. Its wings vibrated only feebly in what he assumed was a reflex conditioned by fear.
He did not approach the captive straight away. Instead he went to the small shed concealed by bushes in the far corner of the garden, opened its door and went inside, closing the door behind him. A copper dish had been placed on a table in there. There were candles in ornate holders to either side of the dish and Carrington took a brass cigarette lighter from his pocket and lit the wicks of both with a few muttered phrases nobody listening would have been able to make out.
The dish contained tufts of hair, nail-parings and dried semen. These human traces had all been derived from his own body. He went out again, careful that the gust of damp air from outside did not extinguish his candles. He leant into his trap and gathered the bird in a manner made confident by frequent practice, folding its wings firmly in the grip of his left fist.
He went back into the shed, took a pair of secateurs from a hook on the wall, snipped off the head of the bird and muttered some more words as he squeezed the blood from its convulsing body on to the heaped detritus of the dish.