The Memory of Trees

by F. G. Cottam

  In the event, he didn’t join them for lunch. That was fine – the meal was an opportunity for his boss and Francesca to get acquainted with his two trusted lieutenants and for Pete and Dora to try to get the measure of the man they were all ultimately being paid to satisfy.

  Curtis had to go and check out what the ex-army logistics and mechanics boys were doing with the helipad and the airstrip they were improvising. Though the amount of material they’d bought along in their trucks suggested the results would be anything other than improvisational.

  He had to check out too the progress being made with the living quarters being erected at a spot close to the estate’s eastern apex. It was a reminder of the vastness of the place that these substantial projects could be going on at two locations on it and, unless you knew, you could sit on Abercrombie’s sun terrace and really believe you had the tranquil wilderness stretching before you entirely to yourself.

  These jobs were weather dependant and they were working to a schedule that was more than just tight. He’d worked with both teams before and knew that they were good. They’d have called him if they’d been confronted by snags or setbacks or with routine questions and they hadn’t. They’d been thoroughly briefed, they were specialists and they were getting on with it without any attendant drama. But he still had to verify their progress. It was his job.

  He spent an hour with Stanhope, the former Royal Engineers Captain who’d built a thriving civilian business with ex-forces comrades constructing everything from tennis courts to pontoon bridges in the wake of large-scale floods. He asked Stanhope whether it would be possible to get some ex-army ordnance – specifically a couple of military-grade flame throwers and the petroleum jelly to fuel them with.

  ‘Shouldn’t be a problem, but they’re pretty heavy-duty, Tom. You sure you can’t manage with the civilian kit?’

  The civilian kit had a throw of about twelve feet and was fuelled by propane. It was used mostly to clear canebrakes. ‘No,’ Curtis said. ‘I want the serious hardware for the job I have in mind.’

  He ate a sandwich and shared tea from a flask with Carew, the Irish ganger supervising the building of the accommodation block. Leaving Carew with a handshake, he had a moment when he realized guiltily that he was revelling in the freedom Sam Freemantle’s absence had given him. He was pretty sure Freemantle would have deliberately cramped his style. Still could, should he come back. In the meantime he was getting on with things.

  And so it was close to six o’clock by the time he returned to the house and observed without surprise that the quartet he’d left behind had by that time enjoyed a drink together.

  They weren’t exactly pissed. They’d had one, possibly two drinks apiece. Doing so hadn’t noticeably affected Dora, but Francesca gave him a smile on his return that he thought Freemantle would have scowled on seeing. Abercrombie’s cheeks wore a slight flush and his eyes had brightened. He’d retrieved his steampunk goggles from wherever. They were hanging around his neck. Curtis thought it a measure of his increasing frailty that a man who’d been such a hedonist in the past could be so affected in the present by a couple of glasses of beer.

  Pete’s demeanour was most altered by the booze. He’d loosened up. He’d changed out of his bike leathers and boots into a track top and a pair of khaki shorts. He’d brushed out his long blond hair, which the crash helmet had flattened on his journey there. He was relaxed and smiling and Curtis thought he’d probably been treated to a couple of outrageous anecdotes from Abercrombie’s rock ’n’ roll repertoire. Or maybe Dora had put him at his ease. She was sensitive to mood and with Pete knew from experience which buttons to push.

  ‘Took your time, Tree Man,’ Abercrombie said. ‘Everything simpatico?’

  ‘Both teams are slightly ahead of schedule. They’ve both got shifts working through the night. The airstrip boys should be done by midday tomorrow and the accommodation block will be up and running by tomorrow night. That’s plumbing, wiring, generator, the lot. They’re good.’

  ‘You get what you pay for,’ Abercrombie said. Then he said, ‘Your people are very curious to see my yew.’

  Curtis wondered at the veracity of this remark. Bus men and holidays came immediately to mind. How excited could seasoned arboreal pros like Dora and Pete be to see a solitary yew?

  He just nodded. He wanted to see it himself. Moreover, he wanted to see how his people reacted to the atmosphere of Puller’s Reach.

  They all went and they went on the quads. And the surprise announced itself to the sharp eyes of Tom Curtis a good two miles short of their destination as they travelled over the undulating ground. He didn’t comment. A comment wouldn’t have been heard over the noise of five competing engines. He glanced at Abercrombie to see if there was some reaction in his expression, but behind the goggles it was impossible to tell.

  There wasn’t one yew tree. There were two, the second slightly smaller than the one Curtis had planted. It stood parallel with the first to the edge of the cliff with about five feet of space between them. The earth around the base of its trunk was undisturbed. It looked as though it had emerged from the ground a couple of decades earlier and matured and thickened through the seasons.

  ‘Sam Freemantle must have planted it,’ Abercrombie said.

  Curtis, who knew that the inviolate ground contradicted this theory, said nothing in reply. He could think of no natural explanation for what he was looking at. It was as though the yew he’d planted had been rapidly and exactly cloned and subject to growth so accelerated it would qualify as miraculous. Or uncanny.

  To her father, glancing across to Curtis, Francesca said, ‘I reckon it’s that Balkan kidnap gang that’s stalking you, Dad. They’re probably bored. The devil makes work, and so on.’

  So Abercrombie had told her about the earlier conversation they’d had on discovering Freemantle’s Land Rover. Of course he had. She was here because he was dying and he kept nothing from his daughter.

  ‘Well, they look like they belong, that’s for damn sure,’ Pete said.

  Curtis looked at him and then for Dora, who had wandered away from the group and stood forty feet away, examining the Puller’s Reach cairn on her haunches.

  ‘Amen,’ said Abercrombie, slapping Pete on the back, raising his goggles to rest on his forehead, clearly pleased rather than freaked out by what he was looking at. He was a businessman. Production in his latest enterprise had just doubled and the increase in output had come at no extra cost.

  Curtis studied Pete’s expression. It was slightly dazed, as though something had shocked him, unless he’d just had a couple more than the one or two beers the rest of them had cracked. He’d ridden his quad OK, but then he was an experienced motor cyclist and the terrain gave him plenty of room to steer a stray line or have the odd wobble.

  He walked across to Dora. He said, ‘There’s only supposed to be one yew. Only one was planted. Nothing else has gone into the ground.’

  ‘Well, something’s come out of it,’ she said. She was fingering the stones of the cairn, stroking their moss and lichen-stained surfaces with delicate fingertips. ‘I’ve seen these before, in parts of Saxony and the Polish forests,’ she said.

  ‘What do they mean?’

  ‘It’s what they symbolize, Tom. It’s what they warn of.’ She stood and looked around and then held him directly with her eyes. They were dark brown, almost black, difficult to read. ‘They signify places of enchantment,’ she said. She brushed moss from her fingertips off against the fabric of her jeans where it was taut against her thighs.

  He turned and walked past Francesca on his way to talk to Pete, who was staring down over the cliff face at the beach with a slight grin of bemusement. He smiled at her in passing. He didn’t realize how perfunctory the smile must have appeared until Francesca whispered after him, ‘She’s beautiful.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘More a question of who than of what, Tom. Dora is beautiful. And she’s lovely, which might prove to be what my d
ad would call a bitch.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘I think you do. But go and talk to Pete. He looks like he needs you to.’

  ‘I’ve known Dora Straub for years. Her professional credentials are impeccable.’

  ‘God, you’re so pompous in your project manager hat.’

  ‘How much did you lot have to drink?’

  ‘Go and talk to Pete, before he falls off the bloody edge of where he’s standing.’

  He went and stood next to Pete, able to smell the beer on his breath, aware that somehow Pete had managed to sink a couple more than the others had.

  ‘Still no word on Charlotte?’

  ‘Nothing you’d call encouraging.’

  Pete gestured at the beach. ‘There’s something fucking odd about this place. Something’s not right, Tom.’

  ‘I’ve been here a while. I thought it was just me.’

  ‘Nope, things aren’t right here. They’re sort of out of kilter, if you know what I mean. This is a weird location, strange vibes.’

  ‘I need this job. It’ll make our reputations.’

  ‘You and Dora already have reputations.’

  ‘I don’t have a pot to piss in, is the truth of it. I was with Eddie Stanhope earlier, who drives a Bentley. Then I had tea with Patsy Carew, who has a villa on the Algarve. I’ve never made any real money, Pete. This job’s my shot.’

  Pete turned and looked at him. ‘Going to court over your girl?’

  ‘Yes, unless Sarah has a sudden change of heart.’

  Pete belched. ‘Then this job’s got you by the balls, Tom.’

  SIX

  Andrew Carrington had spent hundreds of hours in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. He had researched there, written there and curated exhibitions there that had proven very popular with both the public and the press critics who reviewed such events. He had never stolen anything from the museum, though, and had never dreamed that he would. But he was about to do it now and couldn’t help but muse on how very strange it felt to be on the verge of committing a crime serious enough not only to ruin his professional name but to put him behind bars for a couple of years.

  The artefacts he was after were not on public display. That was a blessing. It made the theft an easier proposition practically. And it meant that it would take longer for the theft to be discovered and for the police to be alerted and begin their dogged and meticulous process of recovery.

  The theft would be discovered, that was inevitable. It might remain undetected for a few weeks or even months, but eventually someone would realize that something irreplaceable had gone. A process of elimination would point the finger of blame inexorably at him. He had the feeling, though, that by that time it wouldn’t matter very much and if it did, by then he wouldn’t really care.

  The pieces he intended to steal were part of the Mandrake Hoard. It had been stumbled upon by an amateur treasure hunter armed with outrageous luck and a metal detector. He had made his find in the Cheviot Hills. This particular hill had not been a hill at all, but a burial mound. His treasure trove proved to be the possessions of a Saxon chieftain or possibly even a king. Carrington had helped to inventory and catalogue the hoard once lottery money had been used to pay for it at auction.

  Most of the hoard was on display. It was the most spectacular collection of precious Saxon metalwork since the haul discovered at Sutton Hoo. The chieftain had been buried in his armour, with his sword and shield, and they were intact and with his helmet represented the finest examples of Saxon weaponry ever found in Britain.

  The two items Carrington coveted were not on display because they did not really fit in. They were Celtic artefacts and they dated from a period a century before the other stuff the tomb had contained. They were, frankly, anomalous, a chronological and racial contradiction that had proved to be nothing more than a headache for scholars during the two baffled decades since the find.

  They were a pendant and an amulet. They were heavily scrolled and fashioned from gold. The pendant had at its centre a flawless emerald. They were handsome pieces and despite their anomalous nature, they were priceless. But Carrington was not stealing them for their black market value. He was doing so because he was confident he had worked out what they were for. He thought he would have need of them should fate conspire to take him to Pembrokeshire.

  The elements of the theft that made it so easy for him were also those that would make it obvious he was the thief. He was a Friend of the Museum, with a special swipe card giving him access to secure areas to which the public were not permitted to go. He did not have to endure the public indignity of having his bag searched on the security desk when he left. He could visit the museum at hours when it was not open at all to the general public. All of which was very convenient.

  He saw three or four people he knew and was obliged to acknowledge on his way to the room where the pendant and amulet were tagged and shelved. The room was heavily locked and the heat and humidity of its interior were controlled. He didn’t know how frequently the items it contained were dusted. Even dusting them would be a specialist job and the climate control might make it completely unnecessary. If it was done, that was how long he had before they were on to him.

  He barely looked at the two items before lifting them from the shelf and putting them in the bag. He was surprised handling them, as he always was, by their weight. They were gold and their purity was absolute. But he thought their weight owed as much to their significance as objects as to the density of the metal from which they had been fashioned.

  A cosmological chart had been one of the items recovered in the Mandrake Hoard. It was engraved in bronze and it had been theorized that the noble occupant of the grave had been a distinguished traveller in his life, a man who had explored in sea-faring voyages well beyond the shores of his native country.

  Carrington did not share this belief. He thought the chart signified activities much darker and more interesting than using the stars as a navigational aid. The objects now in his briefcase were the proof of that. A Saxon king had not commissioned their creation. But they had somehow come into his ownership and he had appreciated their properties, hadn’t he? He’d had sufficient regard for them that he’d had the pendant and the amulet buried with him.

  Carrington endured a bad moment on his way out of the museum. An ex-colleague stopped him and insisted on discussing a matter over which they had disagreed for thirty years.

  The rotund figure confronting him was Harold Flowers, a St Margaret’s medieval history don with an irritatingly amateurish sideline in mythology. He’d written something absurd speculating that Nazi militarism had been influenced by the cult of Odin. Then he’d compounded his sin by having this rubbish published in a respected journal. Carrington had dismissed it witheringly in an essay of his own. Now here the idiot was, wanting not so much to prolong as to exhume their original argument.

  He felt he had no alternative but to capitulate. There was a place for academic pride and scholarly integrity, but it wasn’t with a briefcase full of stolen loot bulging heavily under one’s arm. He admitted to Flowers that he’d been mistaken. He accepted defeat totally and with good humour, he said. The argument for what Flowers had claimed was overwhelming. He congratulated his opponent with magnanimity and a smile. It almost made him physically sick to have to do it, but it was what the circumstances demanded.

  He made for the exit cursing his luck. He thought that should he ever see Flowers again it would likely be as a performer in the witness box at his own committal proceedings.

  It was just after seven in the evening. If he hurried he could be on the seven-thirty London train and back in Kingston by half nine. He’d deposit the contents of the briefcase in the strong box in his study and with luck he’d be in the pub by ten. Food did not really figure in his plans for the evening, but then he was fairly indifferent to food. A drink was a different thing entirely and Carrington felt he’d have earned a pint or two by the time he got to t
he pub tonight.

  David Baxter was fairly sure he was being haunted. It wasn’t the stereotypical stuff, the creaking doors and phantom thumps on stairs with no one walking up or down them. There were no cold spots in his flat and he couldn’t claim to have witnessed a poltergeist cabaret of kitchen implements pitched as missiles by an antic spirit.

  It was subtler than that. It was almost sly in its calculation. He’d been unnerved and irritated by it and after enduring almost a full day of it, he really wanted it to stop. He certainly wanted it to stop before night fell.

  His flat occupied a quiet spot on a residential road in Richmond. It was an old stable conversion and he was extremely proud of it. His study had a wood-burning stove and his galley kitchen glittered with chrome and high-tensile steel. There was a Naim hi-fi system worth several thousand pounds. He’d been to their Salisbury showroom to audition in their listening suite before selecting and paying for it with his platinum Amex card.

  It was the hi-fi system that was giving him the trouble. It had been doing so all day. He would leave his sitting room, where its components were mounted on their custom-finished hardwood shelves and the lights on each would glow, indicating they were innocently poised on standby. He would return and music would be playing. It was always the same tune and the system signalled that the source component producing the sound was his CD player.

  It was a Dusty Springfield song. He knew that because he had heard her distinctive voice often on car journeys when he tuned into Radio Two. The song playing each time he came back into his sitting room was easing out of his speakers softly, at low volume. The song was, ‘I Only Want to be With You’.

  Baxter didn’t own any Dusty Springfield CDs. Open the disc drawer and it would be empty and the song would sigh to a halt only to have begun again if he left the room and then re-entered it.

  Anyway, it didn’t exactly sound like Dusty Springfield. It sounded a bit like Annie Lennox, who had recorded the song with her first band, the Tourists. It didn’t sound exactly like her either, though. It sounded like an amalgam of the two of them and the instrumentation was subtly off-key. How the song actually sounded was less real than recalled by someone’s slightly inaccurate memory.