by F. G. Cottam
A little later that morning, Sarah Bourne went to the Riverside Café. She rightly assumed that the café’s proprietor would have a contact number at which she could reach Professor Carrington. He was on friendly terms with his regular customers. She could have gone through the university switchboard but regarded her business with the professor as personal and didn’t want to approach him that way.
She called him and arranged to meet him at his home. He gave her an address on Kingston Hill. She had ridden her bicycle to the café; it was a sunny June day and theoretically a pleasant one on which to ride. But she felt increasingly troubled about events going on in Wales. Charlotte was sleeping better, but the sketches had grown more lurid and disturbing. She had a painting rolled into a cardboard tube in her pack she wanted to show to Carrington.
The sun shone and the birds sang in the trees on her route. The pedestrians were bright in their summer clothes and Sarah noticed none of it. She was a mother who monitored what her daughter came into contact with assiduously. She knew that the images in her daughter’s mind were not coming from a computer game or site or some nightmarish DVD she’d been allowed inadvertently to watch. The problem was neither did she believe Charlotte was just dreaming them up.
The blood bond, Carrington had called it. To Sarah’s ears the phrase had sounded medieval. But that had just been her prejudice against a crusty scholar discussing folkloric myths. That sort of stuff held no interest for her and never had. Unfortunately though, it had involved her. And the blood bond between father and daughter wasn’t mythic at all. It was an undeniable biological fact.
His house was a chaotic mess. There were books and maps and pamphlets piled indiscriminately in every room. Everything lay under a patina of dust. There was an odour of stale pipe tobacco. He insisted on making tea before they spoke and presented it with some ceremony on a silver tray. Her cup was decorated with the Willow Pattern and didn’t look particularly clean.
‘I thought you were going to Wales.’
‘I am. I’m expecting a call from Tom Curtis. It’s pointless me going until he invites me. He’s probably reluctant to do so. He seems to be quite a stubborn man.’
‘Very,’ she said.
‘But he’s also a man who wants answers. And he’s in dire need of help. Unless he leaves it too late, he’ll call me. And then I’ll go to Wales. And it might already be too late. I’m doing the best I can to remain optimistic.’
‘Surely the invitation needs to come from Saul Abercrombie.’
‘Fate took Tom Curtis to the Forest of Mourning. It’s from your husband that the invitation needs to come.’
‘He’s not my husband.’
‘He’s the father of your child.’
‘Who painted this,’ Sarah said, picking up the cardboard tube from where she’d placed it beside her chair and handing it to him.
Carrington wore a pair of spectacles on a chain around his neck. He put them on and unfurled the picture in the tube, taking it over to the window of the room to examine it in daylight. The glass was not terribly clean, Sarah noticed. But the mid-morning sun shone strongly through it.
‘What is that?’
‘In Norse mythology they were called the Eaters of the Dead. They’re leech-like creatures. They feed the way a Lamprey does, on a host. But the process is rather quicker because they’re large and they’re thirsty.’
‘It looks revolting, and terrifying. I knew my daughter hadn’t dreamt it up, but I don’t know where she would have seen something so disturbing.’
‘Collective memory,’ Carrington said.
‘You’ve just said those creatures are mythic.’
‘So is the creature they served.’
‘Please don’t speak in riddles again.’
‘There are myths and there are myths,’ he said. ‘Some are completely fantastical. I never expect, for example, to encounter a mermaid.’
Sarah gestured at the picture. ‘While you think you might encounter one of those?’
‘Tom Curtis had an ancestor who did.’
‘You mean that Gregory guy?’
‘There will be people vanishing on the domain Abercrombie deludes himself is his. That’s the meaning of your daughter’s painting. It’s a warning for her father he will never get the chance to heed.’
‘That’s a bit contradictory,’ Sarah said.
‘Why?’
‘Because the forest is what’s required by this Eve person. That’s what you told me. Why would creatures who serve her kill the people restoring it?’
‘A tipping point has been reached. The land is reverting. There are more trees every day than they are putting in the ground.’
‘That’s impossible.’
‘Ask Tom Curtis if it’s impossible. It’s a conundrum he’ll be aware of, though I’d imagine he regards it as the least of his problems.’
‘I’m not ready to speak to him.’
‘You’re as stubborn as he is.’
‘I don’t want monsters in my daughter’s head.’
‘She’s his daughter too. That’s what’s putting them there.’
‘I want it to stop.’
‘One way or another, it will stop soon enough. Matters are reaching their conclusion, I feel. Whatever the outcome, things will be resolved.’ He rolled the picture with a visible shudder and fitted it carefully into the tube. He offered it back to her.
‘Keep it,’ Sarah said, ‘with my compliments. Please don’t bother to see me out.’
He took the picture outside into his garden after her departure and burned it in his empty leaf bin. Isobel Jenks, the ghost of Isobel Jenks, watched him do it, leaning against one of his poplars with a scowl twisting her wan features.
She wanted to interfere with him. Of course she did. She served someone malevolent to a degree beyond the human capacity to comprehend. She wanted to harm him but the precautions he had taken prevented her from doing so.
He honoured the old Gods. He was punctilious and faithful in this and he believed they protected him as a consequence. She could scowl at him in the garden. It had become startling at night sometimes when her face loomed out of the darkness to stare palely into one of his windows. But she could not get into the house and she could not hurt him. Andrew Carrington wasn’t confident of much concerning this present woeful business, but he was sure about that.
He had almost just now mentioned the nuisance Isobel had become to him to Sarah Bourne. Charlotte wasn’t the only innocent casualty of the work being done in Wales by Tom Curtis. He had decided against doing so because Sarah had obviously been so badly hurt by the business in the autumn and, though tact didn’t come naturally to him, he liked her.
He liked her despite her making it fairly plain that she didn’t much care for him. That was all right. Honesty was a quality he respected. And he’d never for one moment in his entire life felt the all too common craving to be popular.
He had entertained Sarah in his lounge. It was the tidiest room in what he regarded as a pretty neatly kept house. He cleared up the tea things noticing that she hadn’t drunk hers, which was a pity because he made a rather good cup of tea.
He went from the kitchen after washing up the cups to his study and picked his way through the unsteady pillars of books rising from the bare board floor and opened his strong box. He took the pendant and the amulet he had stolen from the Ashmolean and examined them, as it had become his habit to do three or four times every day.
He had thought about polishing them, but their dull lustre was the best clue as to their ancient provenance. They had been taken from their owner a very long time ago. He could only imagine the gleam in her eye should she ever lay eyes on them again. He thought he might see that expression for himself in a moment swiftly approaching. He did not delude himself he would enjoy the protection he did from the trivial nuisance Isobel Jenks had become when that confrontation occurred.
Pete decided he’d look for clues on the beach. The meeting had left him feel
ing embarrassed and frustrated pretty much in equal measure. He didn’t like to look stupid in front of Tom Curtis and keeping the workforce up to strength was one of his specific areas of responsibility.
He was generally good at keeping people happy. He had a way of cajoling more out of people than they thought they had to give. It was a happy knack that had made him valuable as a core team member on a number of projects to Tom in the past. He couldn’t really understand what would make people walk away from this particular gig. There was nothing he could identify that would make people unhappy about the work.
Parts of the estate were a mite spooky. You could call them atmospheric, but they were more than that. You might even see them as sinister. The bush at Gibbet Mourning had been positively monstrous and had freaked him out pretty badly. But the people paid to transport and excavate and plant hadn’t had to deal with that – he had, together with Tom.
When the people they’d employed worked in the dark they did so under floodlights. There were large areas of woodland now and some of them were very dense – and, by definition, isolated. But the missing weren’t being hunted down, were they? It wasn’t like there were bears in the woods.
The gangers should have told him sooner that people were deserting the job. It was their failure and they’d no doubt tried to keep it that way until they had realized it was a problem beyond their resources to solve. So it had been elevated with no warning whatsoever into his problem. That was fine. He’d deal with it. If he didn’t, it would become Tom’s problem and he’d have failed and he wasn’t about to let that happen.
He rode to the southern gate. He chatted to the security guys for a couple of minutes and verified that people weren’t streaming out on foot with packs on their backs. That wasn’t the sort of exodus these people would miss. Once outside the perimeter, he rode along the fence west to the area beyond Abercrombie’s land that led to the shore and had reminded him when he’d first arrived of a golf links built for giants.
He thought about Dora. He’d pretty much reached the unhappy conclusion that she was completely out of his league. He’d known that when they’d first met, obviously. But he thought he’d matured over the years since their first encounter and had hoped that might make a difference on this project.
He’d been hurt when she’d laughed at his coming to Fran’s aid when Fran had been freaked by the paw print on her bedroom window. He thought he’d behaved pretty coolly, that night, all in all. Dora had been alone in seeing a comic side to his heroics. But she was the one he had hoped would be impressed when the tale was related the following morning over breakfast. She hadn’t been.
He’d scarpered out of the cave, on his first experience of the estate, on the day of his arrival. His undoing had been in telling them all about that. He should have restricted the information to the discovery of the cave and said nothing about imaginary wildlife. He’d been unnerved on the subsequent cave expedition. Dora had pressed on with Tom to the bitter end. The end had actually been more mundane than bitter, but Dora had been the one to brave any possible risk.
She wasn’t frightened of Rottweiler dogs. Tom had been the one to say that. He could have added that Rottweiler dogs were probably afraid of her.
Maybe he should turn his attentions to Fran. She seemed to like him. She was easy on the eye and sweet-natured, too. It was a stretch, though, to imagine himself with a billionaire’s daughter anywhere else but there. Escort her to London and the paparazzi would be in tow. He couldn’t really see Fran Abercrombie sharing a packet of salt and vinegar crisps over a half of lager in his local. She was down to earth, but her life beyond her father’s orbit was an exotic one.
What he should actually do, he thought, was concentrate on the job in hand. He was being well paid to work on a once-in-a-lifetime project. They were well over halfway to pulling it off successfully. There were a couple of snags, a couple of fairly weird anomalies, but they were gathering momentum by the day. Soon he would be able to start thinking about his bonus and ways in which to spend it. Speculating on that was likely to be more fun than being lovelorn. Maybe he would splash the lot on a babe-magnet car. There were worse investments.
He rode relaxed, the rising cliff face to his right, the sea to his left, the quad much more stable on the mixed surface of pebbles and sand than his own bike had been on that day weeks earlier when he’d got lost on arrival.
His plan was to ride all the way to the north-western extremity of the estate. He didn’t think that the beach had anything to do with the disappearances but it needed to be checked out. Some of the missing workers had vanished from the area on the cliffs to the north of Puller’s Reach. It was possible they’d gone for an after-work swim and got into difficulties and drowned.
Their work was hot. The summer weather was warm. People swam spontaneously. It was something you could do on a whim if there was a beach handy. It was free. There were routes down the cliffs to the sand and when it glittered in the late afternoon, after a long shift, the water could look more inviting than the trudge back to Dodge and beer and card games in a stuffy compound dorm, with its June aromas of diesel spillage and stale human sweat and whatever the galley was frying for supper tonight.
He’d been tempted to have a swim himself. He’d seen a couple of body boards drying, leant against the Dodge recreation block. Someone had taken then out and then shoved them on to a vehicle tailboard and driven back with them. Someone, probably several people, had been for a dip in the sea.
So he was looking for corpses, wasn’t he? It was a grim thought at odds with the beauty of the vista and the day. The beach really was in Enid Blyton mood, with its blue water and golden sand and orange pebbles glittering with dried salt crystals. It smelled wonderful. The last thing he wanted to do was find a rip-tide victim stiff and dead in the surf. But he had to look. He wouldn’t be doing his job properly if he didn’t do that.
There was a figure on the beach. She was slight and, as he approached, he realized that he didn’t recognize her. She wasn’t dressed in the regulation outfits the women planters wore. Anyway, they weren’t planting on the beach. She wasn’t wearing a swimming costume either. She didn’t fit his skinny-dip theory. He brought the bike to a halt about a dozen feet away from her and switched off the engine.
She looked to be in her late twenties and when she smiled at him he noticed that she was exceptionally pretty. ‘You must be Pete,’ she said.
‘Correct. You’ve got me in one. But I have absolutely no idea who you are.’
She frowned. ‘That’s strange. My name’s Amelia. I’m one of Dora Straub’s students, from Hamburg?’
‘And you’re doing what here, some kind of fieldwork?’
Amelia coloured. ‘I can’t believe she didn’t mention me. It’s all been cleared with Mr Curtis and Mr Abercrombie.’
Pete held up his hands, open-palmed. ‘Relax,’ he said. ‘You’ve just slipped under the radar, Amelia. We’ve had a couple of issues sidetrack us and Dora has a hell of a workload. I’m sure she will mention you. I’m sure you haven’t been entirely forgotten about.’
She smiled again. She was a post-grad student, he assumed, obviously smart and really exceptionally good-looking. Just for a moment he wondered how Dora would react to his hitting on one of the girls she taught.
‘Where are you staying, Amelia? It isn’t particularly safe out here. You’re not in Dodge, are you?’
‘I’m not in what?’
‘You’re not in the compound. It’s to the east of here. That’s not where you’re staying.’
‘I’ve a refuge on the beach,’ she said. ‘It’s sheltered and it’s dry. It’s a cave. Dora told me about it.’
Pete nodded, thinking, of course. He would have paid his entire bonus from the Abercrombie job personally not to have to endure a single night in the cave. But that wasn’t how Dora thought at all. To her it was an innocent geological feature. It probably made perfect sense to her to tell a cash-strapped student doing fieldwork it
was a place she could doss down in for free.
He assumed Dora to be unaware yet of the disappearances. He’d been alerted to them by the gangers and he’d told Tom Curtis but they’d only found out the previous night and, to his knowledge, Dora was still out of the loop. Tom might have told her or he might not. Pete didn’t know. Until they discovered what was behind them, the beach had to be regarded as a hazardous place. Everywhere on the estate did.
‘I don’t want to alarm you, Amelia, but for now at least, you’re better off out of the cave.’
‘My things are there,’ she said.
He looked at his watch. It was approaching noon. He said, ‘I plan to ride as far as the north-eastern border of the estate. I can be back here in less than two hours. I’ll give you a lift to the compound and you can quarter there. You can’t stay here.’
‘But I need my things,’ she said.
He nodded. He looked around. Everything seemed not just safe but nursery-bookishly benign. It was a scenario ripe for raft-building and lashings of ginger beer. The waves broke at the edge of the sea. The sun was hot on his back. The gulls in the blue above him wheeled and cried contentedly. The idea that this young woman might be in immediate danger seemed an absurd one. That said, she was alone in a remote place and people were vanishing.
‘I’ll come back for you.’
For the third time, she said, ‘I have to have my things.’
‘Fine, I’ll come back to the cave for you.’ He glanced at the water to his left. ‘Don’t go swimming in the meantime.’
‘I can’t swim.’
‘Good.’
He took out his mobile. He thought he should call Dora as extra insurance, just as back-up. But there was no signal on the beach. It didn’t really matter. Dora already knew Amelia was there, didn’t she? He put the phone back into his pocket and switched on the quad’s engine. ‘See you in a bit,’ he said.
She smiled again. She really did possess a lovely smile.