The Memory of Trees

by F. G. Cottam

  He didn’t think it would be happening if he wasn’t there. If he was working on a case, busy following someone or checking out their company profile in the Public Records office, he reckoned his hi-fi system would remain content to be switched off in his absence. It was more than tedious, it was genuinely unnerving. And after only a few hours, his haunting had taught him something he hadn’t really known about himself: that he lacked physical courage. He was well organized and very intuitive and disciplined. But he really did not want to be confronted by the ghost of Isobel Jenks and he knew that it was her spirit responsible for the trick with the music and, because he knew how vindictive she had been in life, he suspected this was only the start of things.

  He didn’t want to open a wardrobe and reveal her hanging from a hook with a vacant leer across her dead face. He didn’t want her staring into his eyes from over his shoulder when he studied his reflection in the shaving mirror. Soon it would be dark and if her pale face smudged one of his windows looming from outside he thought that he might actually scream.

  The smoke was the reason he suspected he might see her. He’d been aware of it really since the morning. He’d had his second conversation with Will Davies, the one in which the reporter had broken the news to him about the fact and manner of Isobel’s death, half an hour after he’d seen her in the park, by which time she was probably on an autopsy table. He had broken the connection. And he had smelled cigarette smoke in his flat.

  Baxter didn’t smoke and he never had. It was a smell to which he was consequently sensitive. He was also house-proud and the idea that his furniture and towels might start to reek of fag smoke was a distasteful one.

  He checked the windows, but the odour wasn’t drifting in through any of them. He opened them all to try to air the place. There was a light spring breeze that failed to do the job. The smoke scent lingered and grew stronger. By late afternoon, it had started to mingle with a scent by Calvin Klein he remembered, from his one-night-stand with her, that Isobel Jenks had worn in life.

  By then he’d become familiar with the lyrics of the song Dusty/Annie persisted in singing on his sitting-room stereo.

  Shortly before dusk fell he decided he’d go out for a drive. His BMW was his pride and joy. It was a rare sports coupe model he’d bought on eBay from a collector in Germany. It had a three-litre engine and would do close to 200 miles an hour at the top speed he’d never come close to reaching in it. The insurance premium was high but Baxter had been driving since he was eighteen, had an unblemished licence and could comfortably afford it.

  He’d nicknamed his car the Beast. He thought there were people who might snigger at that, but every time he got behind the wheel of the Beast and keyed its ignition, he felt his self-esteem bolstered. He always climbed out of his car after a drive feeling several inches taller.

  He settled into the contoured leather driving seat and backed it out of his garage. He put his side lights on because it wasn’t fully dark. He thought that he might drive around the M25 for a while. Five lanes of rush-hour traffic wasn’t everyone’s idea of fun, but it was everyone’s idea of normality and David Baxter badly needed that.

  He might come back to his flat tonight and he might not, he thought. His wallet was in the hip pocket of his jeans. He thought that if he didn’t fancy coming back he could spend the night in a Travelodge without drama just by taking the exit from the motorway for Kingston or Wimbledon. Both had branches of the budget hotel chain and they were clean and comfortable and they didn’t have ghosts.

  He could come back in the morning at nine a.m., when his Polish cleaning lady Jana was due. Jana was in her mid-twenties and ever-cheerful, and he didn’t think his hi-fi would get up to its delinquent tricks with Jana humming about the place with her polish and her dusters.

  He drove in the outside lane of the motorway, when he reached it, at a steady seventy-five miles an hour because the traffic was light and because he’d read reliably in the Daily Mail that the overhead speed cameras had not been loaded with film for at least a couple of years.

  He’d decided on the Kingston Travelodge. He could expense the modest cost. Later in the evening, they would have first editions of tomorrow’s newspapers. He could read a hard copy of the Mirror, see what sort of a splash they’d made of the story his tip-off had given Will Davies.

  He didn’t expect anything about the enigmatic Tom Curtis much beyond a name-check. It would be all about the mad scale of Saul Abercrombie’s scheme. They’d run the archive shot of his arrest at the Red Lion Square demo back in the seventies. They’d do a run-down of his business career. There’d be an attempt at clarification on the state of his health. He didn’t expect a quote from the man himself.

  They might have a graphic of the proposed forest and its impact on the Welsh countryside. There’d be stats on acreage and tree numbers and infra-structural upheaval and the cost. He could read the story on his iPhone, but it would have much more impact on the printed page.

  Reminded of Tom Curtis, he wondered resentfully why Isobel Jenks had chosen to bother him. Perhaps it was because she had already damaged Curtis as much as she needed to. He had discarded her callously. She had then, by turn, taken from him the woman he loved but had betrayed and the daughter he loved without reservation.

  Baxter was confident she had been unaware, in life, of the deception involved in his own brief and admittedly cynical relationship with her. She was an unforgiving sort of character. But how could she be aware in death of what she’d not known when living?

  What had she meant by saying her work was accomplished? She hadn’t completed her university course and been awarded her degree yet she’d been a diligent and bright student. The only thing Baxter thought she’d accomplished had been done obliquely, when she’d called Sarah Bourne and told her about her affair with Curtis.

  Six months on and the repercussions from that call had compelled Curtis to take the job in Wales. In ordinary circumstances a man as fastidious as he was would probably have turned down something so grandiose. But he needed the money to fight for the right through the courts to see his daughter. He’d taken it on out of desperation. And he’d committed to the job only a few days before Isobel killed herself. But she couldn’t have meant that, could she?

  Baxter’s car stereo blurted suddenly into life. His hands trembled slightly on the wheel and settled. He recognized the song. Over the course of the day, it had grown very familiar. He smelled the leathery cockpit of his car fill with the scent of the Calvin Klein fragrance she’d worn. He had the name of it now. It was called Eternity. And his nostrils filled with cigarette smoke, freshly exhaled from the seat next to him.

  He only glanced at her. He only looked at her for a fraction of a second. She did not look good in the bleached halogen light of the night motorway. She was dead-eyed and grinning, her face a foot away from his, the impression from the bootlace black and livid encircling the soft tissue of her neck. The steering wheel convulsed in his grip.

  He was aware of the crump and jolt as his nearside tyre burst and his wheel rim hit the rise of the central reservation, but the impact of the bridge pillar he collided with was head-on and at the speed he was doing, David Baxter felt nothing at all as his car impacted with its flat concrete mass.

  It was past her bedtime and she knew it and she knew that her mother knew it too, Sarah thought, watching Charlie as she sketched on her drawing pad in her pyjamas. Sometimes she was guilty of keeping her daughter up just for the company. Sometimes she was guilty of doing it to try to compensate for the things that made Charlie a sadder and more reflective child than she ought to have been at seven.

  ‘What are you drawing, darling?’

  ‘It’s the angry man.’

  Angry didn’t sound ideal, but man was better than monster, she supposed. Sarah had been almost concerned enough about her daughter’s dreams and the violent images inspired by them to seek professional help.

  Charlie seemed calmer though than over recent weeks
. She’d been much more relaxed since the delivery of the letter to her father a couple of days earlier. Sarah hadn’t read its contents because she felt that would have been a betrayal of her daughter’s trust. But she guessed from Charlie’s relief after it had been delivered that it had some connection to the dreams.

  She could ask. She could do it now. But she didn’t think it a good idea to raise the subject of the father Charlie pined for just before her daughter went to bed. She wanted Charlie’s room to be a happy, cosy place and for sleep to come easily to her without tears and melancholy.

  She’d text Tom to ask him whether he intended to respond to the letter. She’d do it after Charlie went up. If she did that he’d be confident that she’d be given the reply and that it wouldn’t be intercepted and torn up by her spiteful mother.

  Was she spiteful? She thought that she probably was. Hurt was what she definitely was. Mother and daughter both bore the wounds of Tom’s betrayal. But whatever he’d done, he loved his daughter and, encouraged, would find the time to write her something kind she could place under her pillow and re-read whenever she needed to be reminded of him in a positive way. It was what you did with children. You nurtured them.

  There had been something about the Abercrombie project on the evening news. The story was being broken as an exclusive in the following day’s edition of the Mirror, but journalists gossiped and as soon as a teaser appeared on the paper’s website, there were speculative stories on the Sky and ITN bulletins. They were sketchy and sensational, but they claimed the project was unprecedented in its scale and ambition and its ecological credentials.

  It was ironic that Tom should succeed on such a stage now after years of obscurity and under-achievement. Sarah was confident he would succeed. She might be still hurting, but she still knew that he was brilliant at what he did for a living. The forest would flourish. Saul Abercrombie would realize a rich man’s majestic folly.

  ‘Can I look at the picture of the angry man?’

  ‘It isn’t quite finished.’

  No, young lady, Sarah thought, with a smile at the use of the classic staying-up-that-bit-later ploy. ‘You won’t finish it tonight, darling. It’s way past your bedtime already.’

  Charlotte sighed and paused. She said, ‘It’s almost finished. You can look if you really want to.’

  The angry man looked like he was covered in tree bark. There were whorls and runnels in his skin. When she looked closer she saw that they were rents in his flesh, as though he’d been wounded everywhere and the wounds had not been stitched or bandaged but allowed to begin to heal grotesquely.

  ‘He’s very ugly, sweetheart, never mind angry. What’s he so angry about?’

  ‘I don’t know. The words he says in the dream make no sense. He talks nonsense. I think he might be mad. He’s lost. Maybe he’s angry about being lost.’

  ‘Is he scary?’

  ‘Everyone in the dreams is scary except my dad.’

  ‘Who is scariest?’

  ‘I think the lady who doesn’t want to be drawn. I haven’t seen her face, Mummy. I wouldn’t like to.’

  ‘Is your dad in danger in the dream?’

  ‘Yes. That’s why I had to write the letter, to warn him. But I’ve warned him now and my daddy is quite brave and clever, you know.’

  ‘Of course he is, Charlie. Now go up and brush your teeth.’

  ‘Will you come and snuggle me in?’

  ‘Ten minutes.’

  When Charlie had gone up, Sarah switched on her desktop and went to the BBC website to see if there was anything further on there about the Pembrokeshire project. As she scrolled down a local story caught her eye. There’d been a motoring fatality on the M25 not far short of the Kingston exit. There was a picture of a car flattened against a bridge pillar.

  She winced, looking at the picture, which she assumed had been taken on a smart phone by a passenger in a vehicle driving past the scene. These modern devices, with their autofocus and mega-pixilation, were the bane of her industry, because of the flaws they exposed whenever they were pointed at a celebrity face.

  But they had a worse role to play in the way they intruded into personal tragedy, ensuring that nothing ever really remained private anymore. The car wreckage was a ragged concertina of chrome and glass and fawn bodywork and seat upholstery, and there was a vivid crimson splash against the concrete where the accident victim had collided with it after crashing through his windscreen.

  The only consolation was that the twenty-seven-year-old at the wheel had been the only person travelling in the car. It wouldn’t be much of a comfort to his grieving family, but it was something.

  There was a head and shoulders shot of the dead man. He was young and nice-looking in a studious sort of way, and Sarah thought there was something vaguely familiar about him.

  There was nothing really new about Pembrokeshire. There was speculation about the budget and a bit about some diggers awaiting customs clearance in the port of Fishguard. But anyone could conclude that the roots of mature trees would require quite a bit of planting space. And excavating machines, whatever their dimensions, were not the sort of thing Sarah really got excited reading about.

  She switched on the radio. She liked Smooth Radio – easy listening without the obvious clichés, a serene contrast to the frenetic MTV based stuff she was always obliged to endure on shoots. She poured herself a glass of wine. Dusty Springfield was singing the last few bars of, ‘I Only Want to be With You’. Or it might have been the version by the Tourists. The presenter was fading it out and it was too indistinct and brief a snatch of song to tell. It was followed by Marvin Gaye singing, ‘What’s Goin’ On?’

  Humming along, she walked over to the table carrying her wine glass and sat and turned Charlotte’s sketch pad around so that she could make a clear study of The Angry Man. She grimaced. He was shaven-headed and heavily muscled, sitting despondently beside a cairn of stones and he looked like he’d been flayed.

  She had the sense that these images were being presented to her daughter whole. They had nothing to do with her imagination or her interests. They were as skilfully done as they were because Charlie had inherited the gift for drawing that both of her parents possessed. But she executed them as though it was some ponderous responsibility.

  For Sarah, the proof of this lay in the bottom corner of the page, to the right of the cairn, where Charlie, bored, had sketched her father’s smiling face. It was careless and cartoonish and didn’t belong with the grim exactitude of the main image represented there. That she’d done out of a kind of duty. This she’d done purely for fun.

  She looked at her watch. Eight minutes had elapsed since Charlotte had climbed the stairs. She was supposed to brush her teeth for two. She’d be in bed. Sarah would go up now and snuggle her in. Her daughter might already be asleep, but Sarah was a woman who liked always to keep her promises.

  Saul Abercrombie was in the basement communications room reading about his forest project in various on-line media and Francesca had retired to bed when Pete told Dora and Curtis about his experience earlier in the day on the shore. He seemed relieved to get it off his chest. Curtis concluded it was what had been bothering him since the moment they’d met him at the western gate.

  ‘I don’t know if it was on Abercrombie’s land or it wasn’t,’ he said. ‘If it wasn’t, it couldn’t have been far from being.’

  ‘The cave’s on the estate, all right,’ Curtis said. ‘It’s quite famous. You might say it’s almost mythic. I don’t think there can be two of them.’

  They were on the terrace. Night had long since fallen and they had a busy day ahead of them and a full day just behind them, but none of them had felt like turning in and, old friends as well as colleagues, they’d had some catching up to do with one another.

  ‘I was scared,’ Pete said. ‘I don’t mind admitting it. I could try to butch it out and say otherwise and that’s a temptation now, full of Dutch courage as I am, but being scared seemed like sou
nd instinct at the time. Running away struck me as nothing more than common sense.’

  ‘You’re a wuss,’ Dora said, reaching from her side of the table they shared and ruffling his hair. ‘It was probably an unwanted dog, a stray that’s made the cave its home.’

  ‘It wasn’t. No dog on earth smells like that. It was too bloody big to be a dog.’

  ‘It could have been a dog with distemper – one of the larger breeds. Maybe a Rottweiler, something like that. There’s a mundane explanation, whatever it was,’ she said.

  Curtis said nothing. He thought that Pete’s story fitted very neatly with what he’d heard from Saul and Francesca when they’d told him the legend of Gregory, slayer of dragons, the knight summoned from Cornwall to dispose of monsters hereabouts. On the other hand he didn’t know of any living creature that could endure for a thousand years. A tree could do it, an oak at a push, a sequoia comfortably. But not a mammal or reptile and besides, Gregory had done what he’d been sent to do and killed all the monsters.

  He didn’t think there was anyone living who thought this location was weirder than he did. Freemantle might have; he’d known it for substantially longer and knew it much better. But Curtis had come to the conclusion that Freemantle was unlikely still to be alive. Maybe his old gangland contacts had caught up with him over something unresolved. If he was alive, he would have returned.

  His thinking pretty much echoed Francesca’s on that. He thought nothing mattered so much to Sam Freemantle as did the approval and attention of his boss. He’d said he’d take a bullet for Saul and the claim hadn’t struck Curtis at the time as hollow rhetoric. He’d failed to return because he’d been unable to. Death was a conclusive limiter of choice.

  But Curtis had decided to keep quiet about the weirdness. If Pete and Dora discovered it for themselves, experienced and spoke about it, then that was a kind of vindication. He’d know then that he wasn’t just being over-imaginative in a place sufficiently desolate to provoke the senses into irrationality.