The Memory of Trees (31 page)

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.

Curtis was on his way to Gibbet Mourning when he felt his mobile vibrate in his pocket. It was Carter, the picturesque ganger. ‘We’ve found a body,’ he said.

‘Shit!’

‘Not what you’re thinking, Tom. This guy’s been here a while.’

‘We need to tell them at the house.’

‘I already have. We found him an hour ago. I’ve been trying to get you since then. This is the first time you’ve registered any signal. I called the house landline and told Francesca Abercrombie forty minutes ago.’

‘Where’d you find him?

‘Nearest landmark is the Puller’s Reach cairn. The grave is about a thousand metres inland from those Freemantle Theory yews we didn’t have to plant.’

Curtis grimaced. He liked Carter but was getting weary of Freemantle Theory jokes. They’d never been funny and they got less so as parts of the forest they weren’t responsible for continued stealthily to grow. ‘I’ll be with you in about twenty minutes,’ he said.

Saul Abercrombie and his daughter were already at the site when he arrived there. The earth-mover had taken the top off the tomb very cleanly. The skeleton was intact on its back in an oval depression about eight feet below where the surface of the ground had been. The double-edged blade of a battleaxe was plainly visible laid next to Gregory’s remains. Even some of its wooden handle had survived, preserved by the rawhide binding which the warrior had gripped to wield the weapon. There was the bronze boss of what Curtis assumed had been a wooden shield.

‘The grave’s been ransacked,’ Abercrombie said. ‘Crawley got that part right, Tree Man. There’d have been jewellery, guy of his station in life. He’d have been buried with his treasures and mementoes. He deserved a more dignified end. He deserved to rest in peace.’

‘Amen,’ Curtis said.

‘This is becoming a place of ghosts,’ Francesca said. It was what she’d told him her mother had told her the previous night and Curtis couldn’t argue with the observation. He’d seen Gregory’s ghost on his first visit to the shore below Puller’s Reach. The dead weren’t resting in peace in this part of the world. Something was preventing it. He thought that if he saw Alfred Crawley’s daughters walking palely through the woods together hand in hand he wouldn’t be surprised. He’d be shocked, but not surprised.

To Saul, Curtis said, ‘Will you call in an archaeologist?’

‘There’s no archaeology left, brother. The second son saw to that. Badass offspring, just like Crawley said. What I’ll do is have a proper grave dug at Raven Dip.’

‘The church is deconsecrated.’

‘It was consecrated once.’

‘I should tell Dora. She’s overseeing there this afternoon. I’ll tell her to hold off until you’ve decided exactly how you want it done.’

He looked down at the remains, thinking,
We all come to this eventually
. Gregory hadn’t been much less than six feet in height, by his rough estimation. That was tall for the period but then he’d been described as physically formidable. He’d been broad-shouldered and he’d had all his teeth. Not much sugar in the diet back then and anyway he’d probably have died before the rot had a chance to set in. Life expectation in those days had been brutally short.

The grave was shaped like the hull of a boat. Its planks had been planed smooth and sectioned and time had petrified them into something closer to stone. The bones lying there were age-mottled and brittle-looking. Once they had been strong. Time had made them fragile. Exposure to fresh air would quite rapidly render them nothing more than dust.

‘It happened, didn’t it?’ he heard himself say. ‘The legend isn’t a legend at all. It’s historical fact. It’s the truth.’

‘Yeah, Tree Man, it’s the truth,’ Abercrombie said. ‘How cool is that?’

Curtis looked at Francesca. She looked very pale. She said, ‘I don’t think finding him now is something that’s happened by chance. I think it’s a warning.’

Abercrombie chuckled. ‘A grave warning,’ he said.

Francesca shot her father a glance momentarily full of fury and frustration.

‘We’d have found him eventually,’ Curtis said. ‘It was inevitable.’

This wasn’t true. They wouldn’t have found him if he’d been under the yews at the cairn or in a dozen other spots where trees had multiplied without them having to dig. Finding him did seem symbolic. It signified something. There was something ominous about the timing of this discovery. He remembered his promise to himself to call Andrew Carrington. He would do that just as soon as he carried out the business at Gibbet Mourning he’d been diverted from.

He took out his mobile. This close to the shore, he didn’t have a signal. None of them would have just then. It came and it went. To Carter he said, ‘I need you to tell Dora to delay the Raven Dip work. We can re-schedule when the guy down there’s finally at rest.’

‘Shouldn’t take more than a couple of days,’ Abercrombie said. ‘Know anyone who can do it, Tree Man?’

‘Eddie Stanhope’s people could do it.’

‘The crew laid my helipad?’

‘They’re quick and they’re all ex-forces blokes who know how to keep their mouths shut.’

‘They do graves?’

Curtis had turned to leave. ‘They sometimes excavate swimming pools. It’s the same principle.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To look for another forgotten hole in the ground,’ Curtis said. To Carter, he said, ‘Phil?’

Carter walked around the grave and across to where Curtis stood. They were out of earshot of the others.

‘Dora’s in the lab still doing her Ash-back thing,’ Carter said. ‘I’ll get over to her right away.’

‘Never would have figured you for a believer, Phil.’

Carter fingered the crucifix around his neck. ‘You mean this?’

‘You’re decked out like someone scared of vampires.’

‘A lot of the guys are wearing them,’ he said.

‘Since when?’

‘Since the disappearances started to become something we couldn’t rationalize.’

‘Where are you getting them from?’

‘One of the guys in Dodge used to be a silversmith.’

Curtis shook his head. ‘So Dodge is down to one sane resident.’

‘Dodge has some seriously spooked residents Tom,’ Carter said. ‘And on this gig, more and more of them are voting with their feet to walk away.’