by F. G. Cottam
‘Wouldn’t you like to go to bed with Tom?’
Francesca hesitated before replying. She said, ‘When he first came here, I could have fallen for him rather hard. Obviously he’s nice to look at. He’s intelligent and good-natured. And he seemed melancholy and quite a lonely man. I realized fairly quickly that the isolation isn’t a pose or a seduction ploy. He’s still in love with the mother of his child.’
‘Hopelessly so,’ Dora said. ‘That relationship is extinct.’
‘But genuinely so. It makes him a lost cause.’
‘When did you realize this?’
‘Not soon enough. Not before I’d made a fool of myself with him on the day you and Pete arrived. I drank too much and said something petulant and stupid. There’ll be no repetition.’
‘I think that’s wise.’
‘You would say that, Dora. And the reason you say it is because you don’t welcome the threat of competition. But I think you’re wasting your time. Like I said, he’s a lost cause.’
‘I know him better than you do.’
‘You’ve known him for a lot longer,’ Francesca said, smiling. ‘But I’m a good judge of character.’
And Dora smiled back.
‘That brings me to a question I’ve been meaning to ask you.’
‘Ask away.’
‘It’s bothered me ever since our exploration of the cave. You remember we had a discussion about guns. You made the point that you were experienced with firearms.’
‘I remember, yes.’
‘Yet you didn’t take one. Pete chose to arm himself and so did I. You didn’t.’
‘Maybe I just thought a Glock pistol and a Remington pump-action was insurance enough against a stranded seal.’
‘You weren’t frightened, were you, Dora? I was. Pete and Tom were. I’d say even my father felt a degree of trepidation when we entered that cave. You treated it like a stroll in the park.’
Dora shrugged. She lit a cigarette and inhaled. She tilted her head upwards and exhaled at the sky. Francesca thought she saw light glimmer westward where their graveyard legion of diggers and planters worked through the night. It was probably just her imagination, as they were beyond the horizon darkness made invisible, still too far away to be seen.
‘I don’t believe in ghouls, Francesca. Oh, I believe in monsters. I’ve even met a few. But they’ve always been of the human variety. I’ve never encountered a ghost or a devil and I really don’t expect to.’
‘Would you put my father in the monster category?’
‘No, I wouldn’t. I’m sure he’s done some dubious things. He made himself wealthy and that doesn’t happen by accident. I’m sure he’s quite ruthless in business. He’s been absolutely charming with me.’
‘That can change in a heartbeat.’
‘I don’t doubt it can.’
‘When the forest is completed, where we’re sitting now will have been razed and consumed by it. Will you walk through it comfortably?’
‘I’ll take the guided tour,’ Dora said.
Sarah Bourne suspected she was being followed. She’d had this suspicion before a couple of weeks earlier, but it had been vaguer then. She had been unable to think of a reason anyone might wish to track her movements. And if there was a pursuer, he was skilled at surveillance because she hadn’t caught sight of anyone watching her in a way that seemed furtive or gratuitous.
This was different. She kept catching sight of the same man always roughly the same distance to her rear. He didn’t look physically intimidating. He resembled neither a detective, nor a hired thug, nor an obvious pervert. What he looked like was an academic nearing retirement age. He was tweedy with leather elbow patches and wire-framed spectacles. When she caught him watching her, the look wasn’t obviously salacious. It was surprised and she thought slightly sheepish.
He was there when she left the gym. It was eleven a.m. and her gym was the Virgin Leisure branch next to the Sainsbury’s superstore at Surrey Basin. He could plausibly have been going to Sainsbury’s, she supposed, to do his weekly shop. He hadn’t been shopping already, because he had with him no bags full of stuff.
He wasn’t shopping, though, was he? He didn’t own a car. He didn’t do weekly shops. He’d never become that comfortable with domestic organization. He shopped probably at his local newsagent where he bought everything from milk to loo roll only when he noticed he’d run out. He was a bachelor. He had a bachelor’s frayed, uncared-for look. His interest in women would be an exaggeration termed ‘an interest’. He wasn’t interested in women. So why was he following her?
She walked up to him. ‘Why are you following me?’
‘Has your daughter had very bad dreams?’
‘Mind your own fucking business. Why are you following me?’
‘I can assure you, Ms Bourne, I am not doing it for the good of my health or because I consider it a form of entertainment.’
‘Then why? What’s this about?’
‘It’s about what Tom Curtis is engaged with in Pembrokeshire. He’s in grave danger.’
‘You’re a crank.’
‘I’m a university professor. My area of expertise is mythology. My name is Andrew Carrington. My details are on the Kingston college website. You can check me out.’
‘I don’t wish to check you out. I want you to stop following me.’
‘Has your daughter intimated that her father might be in danger in Wales?’
‘I’ve already said that’s none of your business.’ She took her iPhone out of the pocket of her track pants. ‘I’m going to call the police.’
Carrington looked around. He looked a bit desperate. He was out of his depth. He seemed sincere and, despite herself, Sarah felt a tinge of sympathy for him. Crank that he almost certainly was, he surely represented nuisance more than threat.
‘Do you know the Riverside Café?’
‘Of course I do. Everyone does.’
‘Meet me there in an hour. Give me thirty minutes of your time. Listen to what I have to say and I promise you’ll never see me again.’
‘You’re unwise to try to blackmail me into doing anything, Mr Carrington.’
‘Please,’ he said. He flapped and wheeled about and, with a tweedy shuffle, retreated in the direction of Richmond Road.
She went. She rode her bike there along the river cycle path. It was a pleasant day. The Riverside’s proprietor was a former police officer. It was a safe place in broad daylight and by then she had visited the Kingston University website and checked Carrington out. Unless he had an identical twin he was exactly who and what he’d said and she was honestly a bit intrigued. She didn’t like being reminded of Tom; the subject was tender still. But it was odd that Carrington had known about Charlie’s dreams.
‘Do you have any religious beliefs, Ms Bourne?’
‘I like first names, Andrew. I think the use of them encourages transparency.’
‘Very well, Sarah. Would you please address the question?’
‘I was led to believe I couldn’t have children. Even if I hadn’t been, I’d consider my little girl a miracle. I’m sure lots of parents feel the same way. I don’t really go in for mystical belief. My faith in human nature took a severe blow last autumn.’
They were seated outside. Their table was painted green. The river was intermittently blue when the sun shone between clouds so pretty they looked painted on to the sky. Carrington said, ‘This is a lovely spot.’
‘Why am I here?’
‘The source of every villainous female myth is the same, Sarah. It’s consistently the same character, right through history. The same creature who inspired the story of Eve and the fall is also the snake-headed goddess Medusa and the sorceress Morgana le Faye. It’s inhabited many guises over the centuries, this creature, but it’s always been as a woman.’
She doesn’t want to be seen at all. ‘Go on.’
‘A thousand years ago an ancestor of Tom Curtis defeated and vanquished this creature. She c
an’t be killed, but she was weakened. It’s my belief she’s growing strong again.’
‘It all sounds very colourful.’
‘I believe she entranced Tom Curtis in a Scottish forest last summer and that was why he was unfaithful to the woman he loved with a girl to whom he was physically and emotionally indifferent.’
‘I’m leaving, Professor Carrington.’ Sarah rose to go.
‘Transparency, Sarah Bourne. Do you know that Isobel Jenks is dead?’
She sat down again, heavily. ‘No.’
‘She left a note saying her work was done. She didn’t mean her coursework. She meant that Tom is reviving an ancient Welsh forest. I’m guessing the money is vital to him?’
‘He wants to fight for access to his daughter through the courts. He thinks he needs the money to pay a lawyer.’
‘Only thinks?’
‘I won’t fight him. I’m just hurt and angry with him. I thought we had something wonderful. He betrayed it. Why would this Eve creature want the forest restored?’
‘A thousand years ago it was her kingdom. It was her domain. She ruled it, cruelly and savagely. The project Tom is supervising will enable her to do so again.’
‘Through magic, I suppose?’
‘It’s a very dark and cunning sort of magic. And it’s contagious, Sarah. Your daughter will have been dreaming of her. She has been, hasn’t she?’
‘Why has she?’
‘The blood bond with her father is the reason. The creature will kill him to avenge what happened to her the last time her kingdom was whole. The Forest of Mourning will be a place of grief again. She’ll make it a place of permanent grief.’
‘I don’t believe a word of this.’
‘No, of course you don’t, and who could blame you?’ Carrington said. ‘The modern world revels in disbelief. Ours is a mendacious age. Incredulity is our default setting and the creature will thrive as a consequence. Before anyone takes the danger seriously, she’ll be too powerful to stop.’
‘Why are you even telling me?’
‘I’m telling you so that you can tell him.’
‘You can tell him yourself.’
‘He’d laugh in my face. As you would, if you weren’t so polite.’
‘I’m leaving now, Andrew. Please don’t follow me again or I shall feel obliged to inform the police.’
‘I’m going to Wales.’
‘You’re doing what?’
‘I was always going to Wales. It’s fate, you see. I knew that in the museum at Oxford. It was why I travelled to Oxford. I had need of the artefacts. I was always bound for Wales. I’ve known that really since this started.’
‘Now you’re talking in riddles.’
‘I was accused of doing so the last time I sat here. It was as untrue then as it is today.’
‘Goodbye, Andrew. Take care of yourself.’
Better care than you have been, she thought, turning and taking her bike from the rack to the left side of the café. It was strange the way clever people could ignore the basics like their utility bills and personal hygiene until the surprised moment someone cut off their electricity or complained about the smell.
It was tempting to believe him. This was not because she had a taste for mythology or craved belief in something epic and dark and paranormal. Sarah’s normal was affluent and quite glamorous and would do very well for her.
She was tempted to believe because Andrew Carrington’s version of events exonerated Tom. They meant that he wasn’t to blame for an affair from which he had derived no pleasure. That was the bit Sarah was tempted to believe in. Belief in that was almost as good as going back to the time before his betrayal and her exposure to it in the relentless drone of Isobel Jenks’ voice over the phone.
Was Isobel Jenks really dead? Carrington had suggested she’d taken her own life. He was in a position to know – he taught at the university where she’d been a student. Sarah decided she would find out for herself whether that was true and if it was, whether the dead girl had made final mention of having completed her work. She didn’t pick Charlie up from school until 3.15 p.m. She had time to go home and do that before then.
She wondered how Tom was doing in his Welsh forest. She thought about his desperate urge to fund the legal battle he was committed to having to fight. For the first time since picking up the phone and hearing Isobel Jenks on the other end of it, she felt some sympathy for the father of their child.
Carrington had been right about that. Tom had committed to a scheme on the lunatic scale he had only for money. He was a man to whom money had never mattered very much. But circumstances had conspired to make him more desperate to earn it than he’d ever been in his life. The Jenks woman had been complicit in that. But when Sarah thought about it, not nearly so complicit as she herself had been.
Tom was compromising himself terribly in Wales. This Pembrokeshire scheme was the brainchild of a megalomaniac. No one had come out directly with the claim that Saul Abercrombie was terminally ill, but that was the persistent Internet rumour. Tom had become involved in the final folly of a dying man governed totally by his ego.
This project was actually monstrous. She didn’t think it would unleash the Eve creature Carrington warned against. Even with the evidence of Charlie’s gruesome drawings, that idea was way too medieval for her to entertain. But it was madness and would do Tom’s reputation no good whatsoever.
The mauling in the thorn bush had left him changed. By the time he had the mental fortitude to look back upon it rationally, he thought of it really as the mauling by the thorn bush, because that’s what it had been. The bush had been animate and sly and strong and quick and vicious. It had relished mutilating him. He had no doubt in what was left in his mind about that.
He thought the sight in the single eye he had left was fading quite quickly now. The other had been gouged from its socket. It had thrust a mandible down his throat and torn out half his vocal cords. His face and body were scarred in a manner that made a sort of lattice of his surviving skin.
Its jest had been in sparing him. He didn’t honestly know why he wasn’t dead. He thought his wounds should have killed him; that toxic shock or septicaemia or simple blood loss should have delivered permanent oblivion.
He suspected it possessed some biological predisposition to survive. It was how the shotgun damage had healed so quickly and completely after he’d blasted away at it with volley after volley of lead shot. Some cellular or chemical quality endowed it with stubborn life. It had infected him with a little of that. It had contaminated him with its thorny vigour. And so he lived too.
It was just a theory. He didn’t have the knowledge of horticulture generally an expert such as Tom Curtis possessed. Neither was he stupid. And he was possessed of a set of singular skills that had so far enabled him to hide in his ruined state while he pondered on what to do next with his horribly compromised life.
He’d concealed himself by day in a hide he’d constructed in a shallow depression in the ground near Loxley’s Cross. At night he’d taken to foraging in the food bins behind the galley at the compound built for the labour force restoring the forest. He was living on scraps but they were plentiful scraps and concealment was relatively easy. In his old fugitive days there had been police forces with dogs out looking for him when he’d been on the run. No one was looking for him now.
They would get to Loxley’s Cross in weeks if not days with their diggers and planting. He thought the forest itself was probably big enough and dense enough by now for him to build a home in. It was a little too far distant from his food source as yet. But that was a situation altering every day as the growth stole relentlessly over what had once been the wilderness he’d managed for Saul.
He’d had a moment of weakness. He’d crept up to the house in the small hours desolately lonely and welling with self-pity and he’d spied on Francesca for an hour as she slept fitfully, watching her through the window of her room. There’d been a chink where the curtains
had been carelessly pulled. His one-eyed sight had been better, then. He’d easily eluded the security lights and, of course, he’d meant her no harm. But she’d woken and roused help and he’d almost been discovered and shot by a man he did not recognize.
Fleeing that night, he’d realized that there was no going back. His status now was somewhere between a freak and an invalid. Saul would feel compassion for him and pension him off and pay for cosmetic procedures. Where he’d had the respect and trust of his boss, now there would only be pity. Francesca would wince, looking at his ruined face and scarred body. Even blind, he’d sense her doing it and it would be intolerable to him.
He’d felt in some ways like the master of this domain. Saul’s increasing physical weakness and Francesca’s indifference to her surroundings had encouraged that illusion. He realized now that the weapons he’d amassed in the armoury had been deadly symbols of empire building. He’d wanted to turn the house into a powerbase. The gym had been his parade ground. The comms room had been the observation tower from which his fortress could be vigilantly watched-over and defended.
Arrogance had undone him. As a consequence he’d lost his status, his looks, his health, his ambitions and his pride. He’d been angry at first at the indignity of what had been done to him. He’d been furious. He’d gone to the church at Raven Dip and sneaked inside and spat insults at God through an entire night, the oaths and blasphemies croaking out of his ruined throat so they rasped and repeated around the cold stone walls.
It did no good.
Eventually, after a fortnight had passed and the anger had subsided, he had gone back into the church and he had prayed. He had beseeched God to offer him a sign that all wasn’t as hopeless as it seemed be. Suicide had always seemed the coward’s way out to Sam Freemantle. Even in a remand cell awaiting his sentence for a string of armed robberies, he hadn’t seriously contemplated that.
To his astonishment, the sign came. It arrived in the shape of a slim, slight woman called Amelia, who’d approached him as he sat by the cairn of stones at Puller’s Reach, where the wind whispered through the leaves and branches of what he’d noticed, with surprise and failing sight, had become a copse now of yew trees.