by F. G. Cottam
There was another reason, more compelling than the first. His persistent belief in this was a major reason the weirdness hadn’t deterred him from first staying and then returning and then resolving that nothing would scare him into running away.
He sincerely believed that once the great diggers churned the earth and they began to root trees firmly and in earnest, the character of the land would be transformed. If it wasn’t benign now, it would become so. He’d bloody well see to it.
He’d build a land if not quite fit for Center Parcs, then fit for a family day out in the forest. There’d be picnics and ramblers and maybe a bit of orienteering and hard-core mountain biking over dedicated forest trails. A sanctuary for red squirrels wasn’t out of the question. Looking out from where he sat, knowing that Puller’s Reach and Raven Dip and worst of all Gibbet Mourning were out there in the darkness, it all still seemed pretty improbable. But he was determined to achieve it.
‘Why don’t we take a look tomorrow?’ Dora said.
‘Because there won’t be time,’ Curtis said. ‘There are a hundred and fifty men and women arriving the day after tomorrow. They need to be shown to their quarters and fed and inducted and briefed. Shortly after they arrive, the first serious tree tonnage will start to come in. That’s road and rail and air and it’s a twenty-four-seven operation. You know all this. We don’t have time for Famous Five adventures.’
‘There are only three of us,’ Pete said.
‘Five if we include Saul and Francesca,’ Dora said. ‘And you’ve just confirmed we have free time tomorrow, Tom.’
Curtis said, ‘When the diggers arrive.’
‘With teams to drive them,’ she said. ‘You only have to show them where.’
Curtis shook his head. Dora was a wilful woman. He knew from experience that it was sometimes hard to deflect her from what she wanted. That said, he was proof it could be done.
‘Won’t Saul want to explore this cave? Or has he done so already?’
‘No, he hasn’t. He’s never located it. It’s never been explored in modern times. It’s mostly been a detail in a story from folklore. He could have looked for it, I suppose. He’s owned the land here for a decade. But it’s never been a priority. I don’t think he has any great relish for potholing.’
‘Sensible man,’ Pete said, ‘neither do I.’
‘I think it would excite his curiosity,’ Dora said.
And Curtis knew that she intended to tell him about it, regardless of the consequences. Abercrombie must have kept his promise to flirt with Dora while he was busy with Eddie Stanhope and Patsy Carew. They’d established some sort of a relationship and Dora wanted to contribute something to it beyond batting her eyelashes and blushing at his compliments. Maybe she was also intrigued by the idea of the cave. She was an adventurous woman. She wasn’t frightened of Rottweiler dogs.
‘I’ll tell you what I know about it,’ Curtis said. ‘I’ll tell you what Saul and Francesca told me. It can be your bedtime story, folks, because I reckon on turning in, fairly shortly.’
‘I love a bedtime story,’ Dora said, smiling.
‘Will there be time afterwards for questions?’ Pete said.
It was close to midnight when Curtis reached his room, closed the door softly behind him and began unbuttoning his shirt with a yawn that made his jaw stretch and crack. He was about to ease it off his shoulders when he felt his mobile vibrate in his breast pocket. This late, he thought it might be Sarah, to tell him Charlotte had been stricken by some child ailment. Estranged and distanced as he was, he dreaded that. But it was Saul Abercrombie.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m in the comms room. I need to speak with you, Tree Man. It won’t wait. Find your way down here.’
His first thought on entering was that the comms room would have done a nuclear submarine or an intelligence services monitoring station proud. It was bristling with hardware and everything was bleeping or pulsing and bright and shiny and state of the art. His second thought was that Abercrombie looked, for the first time, like a man without much time left to live. It had been a long and strenuous day for him. He’d probably drawn the same gloomy conclusion Curtis had about Freemantle and was grieving the loss of his to-do guy.
‘I just spoke with the journalist, Will Davies, the dude breaking the story about our project here tomorrow. He informed me of the death of a guy who did some very recent work for me. The death isn’t suspicious. The work concerned you.’
‘You’d better explain.’
Abercrombie took a breath and paused. He was seated half in shadow, intermittently lit by flickering displays on some of the machinery that enabled him to keep in touch with a far-flung business empire from a remote location in rural Wales. Curtis felt his mobile vibrate in his pocket with an incoming text.
‘Saul? I said you’d better explain.’
‘This project is life and death to me, Tom. It’s the last and most significant act of my life. It can’t go wrong. I had you checked out. You know I had a private detective scrutinize your life to make absolutely sure you were my man. A guy named David Baxter. He was a perfectionist, or he was a completest, maybe.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘He went too far. He went further than I wanted him to.’
‘How far was that?’
‘Isobel Jenks.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Isobel Jenks is dead, Tom. She killed herself yesterday. Nothing to do with Baxter, that’s just a ghoulish coincidence. Will Davies might call you, so I had to tell you. And I want to apologize for the intrusion into your private life.’
‘A completely unnecessary intrusion.’
‘I didn’t know that until Baxter confirmed it. There’s our paradox, brother. I couldn’t gamble on good faith, not with the stakes as high as they are here. I had to betray your trust to prove to myself you’re a man worthy of mine.’
‘Neatly put.’
‘I’m sorry. Will you resign? Will you quit on me?’
‘The late Mr Baxter will have provided you with the answer to that one, Saul. You know I won’t quit. Pride’s a luxury I can’t afford.’
‘Rock and a hard place, brother. Tough, for a man of principle.’
Curtis was tempted to ask Abercrombie what the fuck did he know about principle? But it was very late at night for futile point scoring. ‘Pete Mariner found your cave, by the way. Totally by chance. He was lost on his way here. Dora’s all for exploring it tomorrow.’
‘I’m sure Fran will be too,’ Abercrombie said. ‘I’m sorry about Isobel Jenks, if you still felt anything for her, I mean.’
‘I never did,’ Curtis said. ‘I barely remember what happened with her.’
He remembered the text he’d received a few minutes earlier when he got back to his room. He discovered that there were two unread. The first was from Stanhope. A chopper was making an inaugural landing on the helipad just before first light the following day as a formal test of its fitness for purpose. There would be a crate in its payload bay. The contents of the crate were two-mil spec flame throwers equipped with two full tanks of fuel apiece.
The second text was from Sarah. It was a reminder to write a reply to the letter Charlotte had written him.
He decided he would write it there and then. He could compose a letter on his laptop and send it as an email attachment. Sarah could print it off for Charlotte in the morning. But she had taken the time and trouble to put pen to paper and then find an envelope and a stamp. It was quite a series of tasks for a seven-year-old to accomplish. It was the least he could do to do the same in return.
Eddie Stanhope’s crew would be packing up and leaving at noon the following day. He’d give the letter to Stanhope when he went to pick up the flame throwers and ask him to post it. Military types were reliable in obliging with a favour of that nature. Soldiers above all people appreciated the importance of mail.
He finally fell asleep musing drowsily over the contents of Charlotte’s letter. Her warn
ing had been grave and uncannily accurate in some of the specifics of the Abercrombie domain. But there were no monsters to pursue him, were there? It would be proven when they explored the monsters’ lair on their Famous Five adventure. That was if Saul was up to it, which he hadn’t looked, to Curtis. They’d find no monsters, though. Gregory of Avalon had slain them all a thousand years ago.
Francesca awoke at four a.m. slightly hung-over but completely sober. She’d turned in at ten and generally got six or seven hours of uninterrupted sleep. So she’d had six, which was probably about right, given how uncharacteristically early she’d gone to bed. But retiring early had stranded her in the small hours with no real prospect of further slumber. The house was completely quiet. No one was yet coming out to play. For a while, at least, she was totally on her own.
She’d made a fool of herself at Puller’s Reach with Tom Curtis. She hadn’t realized how attracted she was to him until the competition arrived in the alluring shape of Dora Straub. She’d felt dismayed at Dora’s arrival, seeing the lithe, dark-eyed German woman with the sculpted cheekbones and the shining hair pull up at the house in her Jeep. She’d chided herself silently for being shallow and frivolous and then over-compensated by being awfully English and nice.
And then she’d had too much to drink with Pete and Dora and her father and come out with the stupid remarks to Curtis that she’d made on the edge of the cliff.
There was some mitigation. There was the booze, obviously. There was her father’s increasing frailty, which his reduced tolerance to drink had made poignantly obvious. That had upset her. There was the cumulative tedium of having lived in isolation on the estate for the weeks she had since her father’s prognosis, with only Freemantle, the steroid-fed lap-dog, for light relief. And the weirdness with the yew tree had thrown her. It had provoked her puerile joke about Balkan kidnappers, but it had actually been unnerving.
Despite these excuses, she felt foolish and humiliated. It was premature and immature to have the crush she had on a man she’d only spent a few hours with. It made her wonder whether he had this effect generally on women. It made her wonder whether he the sort of cynical opportunist who took advantage of that if he did.
She groaned, sat up in bed and groped carefully for the glass of water she habitually filled before turning in. It wasn’t there. Her bedside table held no glass. She’d been too tipsy to remember it. And the further problem was her intuition insisting that Curtis wasn’t that type at all. He’d been happily monogamous, before his one ill-judged foray into infidelity.
She was thirsty. She was regretful. She was embarrassed and Francesca was also by this point quite wide awake. She pulled back the covers, swung her legs out and planted her feet on her bedroom floor. She got up and went to her window, pulled back the curtains and saw fog pressed up as dense and pale grey as something solid against the panes.
She felt distrustful of fog. Not ordinarily, but here, on her father’s Welsh domain, she was uneasy about it. She had only experienced it once before and she had nursed the suspicion then that it was less a benign natural phenomenon than it was present to achieve something specific. Its purpose had been to disorientate and frighten Tom Curtis, to make him wary about the history and character of the land he had been engaged to transform into something other than what it was.
She saw that one of the panes was streaked. Moisture had dribbled down four parallel vertical lines that looked as though a human hand had trailed them on the glass and left them there. She recoiled and stepped back a couple of paces into the body of her room. She stumbled on the edge of a rug and very nearly screamed doing so.
Members of the Balkan kidnap gang Curtis had feared were out there, really out there, surrounding the house, ready to break in and take her sick father away in a kidnap effort that would surely kill him in his debilitated state. It was an ordeal he didn’t possess the strength to survive. For the first time she felt the novel sensation of missing Sam Freemantle’s boisterous, swaggering presence.
But it couldn’t be a gang. Even in the fog they would have tripped the security lights. Freemantle had placed those and had done so with an ex-con’s expert appreciation of the manner in which crimes involving breaches of security were carried out. The lights couldn’t be disabled from outside the house. Men creeping about out there in numbers would certainly have triggered them.
She couldn’t wake the others. Not on the strength of a trickle of condensation and a fraught imagination, she couldn’t. It was said there was safety in numbers and it was a temptation to rouse them. Curtis and Pete were powerfully built men. Teutonic Dora didn’t seem the sort to panic at the threat of danger; quite the opposite, in fact. But if there was nothing out there – and the absence of the lights suggested there wasn’t anything – she was the one who would look like she’d panicked.
She decided she would go and fetch a pistol from the armoury. Freemantle had insisted she learn how to use one a week earlier. Any number of tedious drills had followed. She’d proven to be an excellent shot. He’d made her try three or four models and asked her to choose the one which felt happiest in her hand.
Francesca didn’t like guns. She had an English attitude towards them. She thought guns and happiness mutually exclusive. But they were useful tools in dire circumstances and she wasn’t going to shoot anyone accidentally. The Glock was the pistol she had felt most comfortable with. It had a good balance, a fast action and it held seventeen nine-millimetre rounds. Hand guns were not particularly accurate weapons. But close-up, the Glock was as accurate as they got.
She was on her way back to her room, her feet finding the familiar route along the corridor in darkness, when a figure loomed from her left and blundered heavily into her. She tightened her grip on the pistol, stepped back and steadied herself, raised it between both hands and slipped off the safety catch as she did so, pointing it at the hulking silhouette.
‘Sorry.’
It was Pete. She recognized his voice. There was enough light to see a pale suggestion of blond hair framing his face.
‘Is that a gun?’
‘Why are you up?’
‘Went to the kitchen for something cold to drink from the fridge, dehydrated from all the beer. Sorry.’
‘It’s OK.’ She had almost shot him and not accidentally.
‘Why have you got a gun, Francesca?’
‘I think there’s someone outside the house in the fog. They shouldn’t be there. Can you shoot?’
He yawned and scratched himself. ‘I can, actually. Coniferous job in Russia, oligarch billionaire, bears in the woods, long story. But yes, I can shoot.’
She took him down to the armoury. He selected and loaded a .22 Remington bolt action using only the dim light above one of the rifle racks so that they wouldn’t be blind when they got outside. Not that they’d see very much if the fog was as thick as it had looked from inside her bedroom window.
She noticed that Pete Mariner slept in track pants and a singlet. His biceps bunched powerfully when he checked the Remington’s action and the singlet was taut across his pectoral muscles. She was glad to have found him awake and relieved not to have killed him. He was reassuring, a comforting presence.
He put the rifle over his shoulder and glanced around and yawned again. ‘Your dad runs a private army?’
‘Come on.’
They exited the rear of the house, the route Francesca habitually used to make her way to her studio. Her bedroom window was set in the wall to their right, when they rounded the corner, eighty or ninety metres away, closer to the front of the building. The fog was dense and palpable, almost sulphurous to breathe, like some element delivered them from a remote and darker time.
She felt there was something there, observing them. She had an inkling of something still and watchful but it had alerted her senses and raised and coarsened her skin in gooseflesh in a way that nothing merely human ever had.
Pete must have sensed it too. He put out an instinctive arm and pushed
her to his own rear protectively. Practically, it was a slight she could live with. He was twice her size and she noticed he moved silently across the grey, damp ground beneath them.
Ahead of them, there was a bark of sound. It was as anguished as a death rattle and as inhuman as the shrill of wind through reeds. It pronounced her name. It struggled with the consonants. But it was unmistakeably her name that reverberated through the folds of mist.
Pete raised his rifle. He chambered a round. He swung the barrel from left to right in a long, chest-height lateral sweep. He swung it back again, alert to sound, seeking a solid target in all the groping blindness before them. She observed that the weapon was rock steady in his grip.
‘There’s nothing there,’ he said, eventually.
‘There was, though.’
‘Yes, there was. It spoke your name. But whatever it was is gone now.’
SEVEN
They took a Land Rover to the spot where Eddie Stanhope’s boys had built the airstrip and helipad. The five of them breakfasted together first and it was decided that they’d explore Pete’s cave once Curtis, with Pete’s help, had finally eradicated the thorn bush at Gibbet Mourning. When they’d completed that bit of unfinished business, Pete could return in the vehicle they were taking out and Curtis could return the one Freemantle had left there.
Curtis got the impression over his wholemeal toast and Marmite that Abercrombie never really expected to see his estate manager again. It was a mysterious and possibly ominous state of affairs but in an ironic way quite fitting. Soon there would be no estate for him to manage. There would instead be a huge forest for which his skill-set was not required.
After they’d told Francesca about the cave, she told them about the nocturnal interlude she’d shared with Pete. Dora stressed Pete’s terror in his brief exploration of the cavern in the cliff face. She played the story for laughs and got them from everyone, except Francesca. When Francesca related her story, she seemed determined to portray Pete as someone possessed of a cool and laconic courage.