by F. G. Cottam
‘Where are they going?’
Pete shrugged. ‘The gangers and foremen are fucked if they know. There’s no job on anything like this scale anywhere else in the country right now, if there ever was. They’re incredulous that people are walking away. But if they’re not, they’re disappearing into thin air, which is just impossible.’
‘They’ve got National Insurance numbers,’ Curtis said. ‘If they sign on for another job, they’ll have to register those and it’ll be on a database somewhere. There’s the Government Department of Work and Pensions. Everyone who works legally in the UK can be tracked and monitored. You can’t avoid it. They do it to make damn sure we all pay our taxes.’
‘That’s the weird thing,’ Pete said. ‘None of them has. In Dodge they’re calling them the Disappeared. There’s quite a few people there getting pretty freaked out about it.’
‘Where’s Francesca?’
‘She went out.’
‘Out? Where the fuck is out, Pete? There is no out. This is a fucking wilderness.’
‘No, it’s not, Tom. If you could bear to drag your eyes away from Dora’s rack, you’d see that quite a lot of it is forest now.’
‘That’s unfair.’
‘Not tonight, it’s not. If you could have tit-fucked Dora tonight, my money wouldn’t have been on you doing much else. You were mesmerized.’
‘I’m not mesmerized now. Where’s Francesca?’
‘She went to Puller’s Reach. I asked her why and she said instinct. I asked her not to go, I reminded her of the night when she was scared by something outside her window, but she wouldn’t be deterred. She’s the boss’s daughter, all said and done. She can do what she likes.’
‘She didn’t want you to go with her?’
‘No. She was on a mission, seemed like.’
‘I’m going to go and look for her,’ Curtis said.
‘Take a gun, Tom.’
‘I don’t like guns.’
‘That’s hardly the point,’ Pete said.
Which Curtis knew it wasn’t.
But he didn’t take a gun. He took a torch and rode a quad and as the land unfurled yellowy in his headlamp beam, he pondered on the word Pete had just used describing his reaction tonight to Dora. Even if you factored in Pete’s pretty much permanent crush on the woman, which made him biased, he’d been right, hadn’t he? Mesmerized was the word he’d used. And Curtis remembered the previous autumn and Isobel Jenks and the way he’d felt then, similarly bewitched.
His memory of the whole episode with Isobel Jenks was incomplete, foggy, in the phase Dora had earlier that evening used. He had never had the intention to be unfaithful to Sarah and he honestly didn’t think he had possessed the desire. He hadn’t even found Isobel likeable. She’d been smart and energetic but she’d done nothing for him physically and had a self-centred character he had actually thought quite repellent.
He’d asked himself often what had led him into that disastrous liaison with its heartbreaking consequences and he had never come up with a satisfactory explanation. He was not faithless by nature. He had a healthy libido and he liked women generally but he had never been a man to let his dick do his thinking for him, even in his adolescence.
Dora was an attractive woman. She had a hauteur that was slightly off-putting and there was little natural warmth or spontaneity to her. She was glamorous and good-looking and shapely, could be mordantly witty and she was intelligent.
But she had embodied all those qualities for the half-decade for which he’d known her. Nothing about her had changed. Drunk or sober, at work or play, she’d never had this effect on him before. They were spellbound, weren’t they, she with her conveniently impaired memory, he with his increasing physical desire for her. And the magic would only get stronger. The Forest of Mourning was returning in all its dark and potent force.
Francesca stood talking to her mother. It was her mother’s ghost of course and not her mother at all but there was no question in her mind about the authenticity of the experience. She had felt compelled to come to the cairn and her mother had been at the spot, waiting for her in the thick cluster of yew trees now flourishing all the way to the cliff edge. She looked a bit pale and monochromatic in moonlight. But there was nothing spectral about her mother’s ghost.
She was struck by the resemblance between them. It was a poignant reminder of where she had come from and the wounding extent of the loss. She had never been angry at her mother for taking her own life, only sad that she hadn’t had the opportunity to prevent it. And of course she missed her mother. She had missed her, she realized, seeing her standing there in her familiar cream coat and suede boots, every day since her death.
‘Thank you for coming.’
‘I felt compelled to.’
Susan Abercrombie smiled. ‘Yes. That’s one of the tricks I’ve learned since my departure. I’ve never used it before. I’ve never felt the need.’
‘Why here, Mum? Why now?’
Her mother looked around. The leaves of the trees rustled slightly in the salt breeze. The cairn crooned a soft accompaniment. Francesca could hear waves breaking gently below them at the edge of an invisible sea.
‘I took my life because your father’s selfishness became unbearable. My death didn’t change him. He was remorseful, filled with guilt for a time. But we don’t easily change our natures. He wants to live forever. I embraced death with a degree of relief, to be perfectly honest with you. He will do anything to cheat it.’
‘I don’t believe you chose this moment just to point score against Dad.’
Her mother smiled. ‘You asked why here and why now and the obvious answer is that it’s easier here.’ She lifted and widened her arms. Francesca couldn’t but notice how beautifully tailored the coat was. Susan Abercrombie had lavished money on her clothes.
‘I’ve always thought this place was haunted.’
‘It’s becoming a domain of ghosts, Fran. Saul is making it so. It’s always been a hazardous place, never really safe for the living. But you’ll be in mortal danger if you stay.’
‘You came to warn me?’
‘Death isn’t the end of love, darling.’
A sob escaped Francesca. It surprised her. She hadn’t expected it. She reached out a hand. ‘Can I touch you?’
‘No. But you can make me happy, Fran. You can do it by leaving this place.’
‘I can’t. I can’t abandon Dad.’
Her mother tilted her head. Her hands were by her sides again. The attitude in which she stood was somewhere between resignation and defeat. It was familiar to Francesca, who remembered it from life.
‘It’s vital you get away. No good can come of your father’s antics here.’ She looked around swiftly, just a flicker of her eyes. ‘Quite the opposite, Fran.’
‘I can’t just leave Dad.’
‘Then make him leave. You all have to get away from here and there’s very little time. This place isn’t regenerating, darling, it’s reverting. It will become darker than you can imagine. The consequences hardly bear thinking about.’
Faintly, Francesca heard the approaching buzz of a quad bike engine. She turned around and saw the uneven glimmer of a headlamp distant through trees.
‘It’s that cute chap your father brought here. Sadly, I rather think his number’s up,’ her mother said. She turned back sharply but saw that she was now alone at the spot. Of course she was. Ghosts weren’t cabaret performers, were they? She was pretty sure of that, though she had never seen one before.
It was Tom Curtis. Francesca was grateful to see him. The apparition hadn’t frightened her but the warning it had given had been horribly ominous. Metaphorically, she probably needed a hand to hold. Physically, she thought she definitely needed a hand to hold. He did more than that, though. He took off his helmet and dropped it on to the ground and put his arms around her and hugged her hard in the fold of his arms.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, when the embrace broke. ‘I shouldn’t really
have done that. It was what you looked like you needed though, to be honest.’
‘It was exactly what I needed,’ she said, sniffing away more tears. She kissed him quickly on the cheek. She had no romantic designs on him anymore. He wasn’t to her mind a single man. But she liked him a lot. She was becoming aware of an aroma, released by their booted feet as they shuffled apart. It smelled musty, decayed. She looked down. The ground where they stood was pale and crumbly in the depressions their feet had made with a trodden carpet of toadstools.
TEN
Curtis and Pete Mariner were both up before dawn the following morning. They intended to find out what it was that was leeching away their workforce. Pete had scheduled a meeting with the gangers for seven a.m. to see if they could provide any enlightenment. Bafflement had been the tone of the call Pete took from the compound the previous night, but they’d had time to sleep on the mystery and things always seemed clearer in daylight.
Francesca was in the kitchen already in her coat when the two men came down. She was going to drive to the helipad to meet her father and ferry him back to the house. It was the sort of routine task Sam Freemantle would have handled back when he’d lorded it on the estate, probably with a loaded pistol in the glove compartment of the Land Rover he drove and a shotgun in the rack behind his seat. He’d had an unendearing swagger about him that the weapons had encouraged.
Freemantle Theory was the name they’d given to their joke solution to the puzzle of the multiplying trees. But the real, enduring puzzle was the way in which Sam Freemantle had vanished so entirely. His departure had been as abrupt as it was inexplicable. Were the workers their fellows in the compound dubbed the Disappeared going the same way he had? They’d have to try to find out.
Dora came down about five minutes after Francesca had left. She had on a cream satin dressing gown paler than her tanned skin and was clearly wearing nothing underneath it. Her hair was unbrushed, giving her a blowsy, wanton look that forced Curtis to swallow involuntarily. His heart had begun to pound at the sight of her. He didn’t think it was the caffeine. She poured coffee from the pot on the hob as she habitually did before going out on to the terrace to light her breakfast.
Curtis followed her. She sat toying with a pack of Marlboro Red at the terrace table back-lit by the rising sun, teasing cellophane off the box with her fingertips.
‘We’re going to the compound for a meeting with the principle guys. We’re losing people. It’s a worry.’
She shrugged. ‘Hard labour isn’t for everyone. You get dirty and it’s repetitious. What’s the strength of the workforce now?’
‘Six hundred, give or take.’
She looked westward, in the direction of Puller’s Reach, where Francesca had told him matter-of-factly the previous night about the warning given by her mother’s ghost. She said, ‘You’re going to lose a few. I’d say it’s inevitable.’
‘They’re not signing up for a wage anywhere else.’
‘They’ve probably used what Saul has paid them to buy a flight to a beach. It’s late June, Tom. You earn and you spend and when you’re broke, you look for another paycheque. It’s the modern way.’
He nodded. She might be right. On the other hand, she might be wrong. ‘What’s your schedule like?’
Dora smiled. ‘Is the boss concerned I might play hooky?’
‘No. Hooky would bore you.’
‘I’ve got some saplings that need testing for the Ash Dieback virus. Then I’m supervising the planting at Raven Dip. Rather a delicate task, the Dip.’
Curtis nodded. This was true. Abercrombie had decided the church should remain intact in its dense portion of woodland to the south. That meant planting the right trees. They had to be substantial enough to blend in with the rest of the forest, but they needed to have root systems that wouldn’t reach and undermine a stone building a thousand years old. It was the sort of aesthetic arboreal challenge Dora liked to take on.
This morning, dishevelled and not yet dressed, he thought she looked rather like a supermodel might after a debauched night of champagne and nightclubbing. She was actually a tree expert with a professorship. But if her name was ugly, it was the only ugly thing about her.
‘See if you can clear that foggy memory of yours,’ Curtis said. ‘It would be helpful if you could remember more of what happened when you met the woman who calls herself Amelia.’
She treated him to a rueful grin. ‘Yes, boss,’ she said.
They took quad bikes because they were better through the trees. The forest had not yet extended to the eastern border of the estate, along which the workers’ compound had been constructed. That would be planted last. It was why Dodge had been built there. But if their meeting with the foremen failed to provide conclusive answers, Curtis and Pete planned to split up and go and look for clues as to where and how the Disappeared were disappearing from Abercrombie’s domain.
Eventually they got to land churned and scarred by the caterpillar tracks and giant tyre treads of the big machines. The tonnage of some of the plant they were using was immense. The sheer volume of vehicles was staggering. Curtis had early on toyed with the idea of building a railhead, like they had in France in the Great War for transporting the shells fired from the big guns in a Somme offensive.
He’d decided against it. The delicate balance between infrastructural upheaval and ecological integrity would have been destroyed had he elected to do that. Nevertheless, the impact on the virgin land of what they were doing was profound and damaging and more difficult for them to travel over the closer they got to their destination. The ground was so deeply rutted in places the quads struggled to cross it at all.
None of this was a surprise to Curtis. He’d been living with it on a daily basis for weeks by now. But he felt conflicted by the assault on this domain. It looked like they had gone to war with the land and that was contrary to everything he had accomplished before this project in his entire professional life.
He pondered on Amelia. He considered what poor Alfred Crawley had written and what Andrew Carrington had warned him against. He thought about Saul Abercrombie and his employer’s reluctance to accept the hand dealt him by fate and more compellingly by his own destructive habits. He thought about Fran. She had suggested he call her that, considering him a friend she said, his pillion passenger the previous night. And he wondered whether he believed any of it.
He did. Dora was the ironic proof. In her presence he could think about none of the things that really mattered to him or to his life or to his future fulfilment. Or he couldn’t without herculean effort. Had Amelia done this as part of some reciprocal bargain with Dora? If so, Dora had been made to forget the bargain’s striking. If so, it had not been done for Dora. It had been done to distract him from what he ought to be doing to stop this stuff from happening.
And it proved she wasn’t strong. She was spreading herself rather thin, was Amelia. She was covering a lot of bases or juggling a lot of balls or whatever platitude you wanted to use. But she wasn’t strong. Not invincibly strong, anyway. Not yet, she wasn’t. He made a mental note to call Carrington. He should do that as a matter of urgency. He should have done it already, he knew. He should have done it the previous evening, the moment he had finished reading Crawley’s account of the events at Loxley’s Cross.
They were there. To Curtis, Dodge looked like a high-end shanty town, constructed as it was of Kevlar-toughened fabric ribbed and framed with titanium rods and girders. They’d been really lucky with the weather. Twice in the decade before their daughter was born he’d been with Sarah to Glastonbury when the festival held there had become a quagmire. Here it had hardly rained since they’d begun. They could be wading through mud between the buildings on earth that was instead bald and hard with the wear of booted feet.
Their meeting was inconclusive. They’d done a roll call that morning. They’d lost another dozen people from the night shift.
Pete said, ‘It’s always at night that they go?’
The gangers sitting around the table in the logistics suite just looked at one another. There was a chart on the wall detailing the progress of the job. There was a computer bank dedicated to arboreal stock control and fuel supply monitoring for the vehicles and predicting meteorological conditions in advance of the weather they faced. There were software programmes for ordering food rations and carrying out a laundry cycle and ensuring everyone was paid on time. None of any of it addressed this particular problem.
‘So,’ Pete said, ‘they disappear at night. We know that the fence hasn’t been breached anywhere along its length. We know from the security guys that they’re not departing through the gates. What does that leave?’
Again, silence. Curtis thought about making a sarcastic crack about the missing people descending the cliffs and swimming away. But he thought it would be tantamount to workplace bullying. He could say what he liked only because he was in charge. It would be a joke made at the expense of the people around the table. They were not to blame. None of them were paid to be gaolers. And he had an ominous feeling about the fate of the missing by now.
One of the gangers, Carter, spoke. He was a picturesque individual, both of his burly arms heavily scrolled in Celtic tattoos, ears elaborately pierced, hair pony-tailed. Curtis had worked with him before and knew him to be both honest and completely professional.
‘The worrying thing is that they’re not taking anything,’ he said. ‘There’s been the odd incidence of petty pilfering here in Dodge. That goes with the territory. But nothing valuable has been taken from the site and when people disappear, they generally take stuff with them.’
Curtis nodded. So did Pete. What Carter was saying was true.
‘We haven’t lost a vehicle. Land Rovers are a big temptation. So are bikes. But nobody’s mislaid a single one. It’s not like anything I’ve ever experienced before.’
Curtis noticed that Carter was wearing a heavy silver crucifix on a silver chain. He hadn’t figured the man for a Christian. Maybe he was, or maybe it was just another of his adornments.