The Memory of Trees (4 page)

‘We’re here,’ Freemantle said. ‘Welcome to Gibbet Mourning.’

A wary dozen feet away from where its barbed tendrils reached out to him, Curtis studied the bush. He said, ‘I thought the land had been ploughed under a decade ago?’ Some of the branches were as thick as his fist. The thorns were curved and cruel, sharp, horny protrusions two or three inches long. He said, ‘How did this thing get here?’

‘You’re the agricultural expert. You tell me.’

‘Air-borne pollen,’ Curtis said, sniffing the air, looking around at the dark spread of land. It stretched featureless in every direction.

‘If you say so,’ Freemantle said.

‘Except that it looks like it’s been here for a long time,’ Curtis said. ‘Nothing could grow to that size in a single decade, I don’t think. Nothing indigenous, anyway. It looks mature.’

What it looked, he thought, was ancient. And malevolent. He shivered. He didn’t think he liked Gibbet Mourning very much. There was something dismaying about the spot. Isolated places did sometimes feel desolate just after sunset, a feeling that was really just momentary grief in the person stranded in them for the light recently lost. It was probably a human instinct survived from prehistoric times, when primitive man was not confident when darkness fell that the sun would ever return.

But it was more than that. Something impended in the silence there, like an unresolved threat. And Curtis felt the self-consciousness of a man being watched. But the scrutiny he sensed did not come from Freemantle, who was looking, like he was, at the great, squat complication of the bush.

‘Watch this,’ Freemantle said. He took a few slow steps forward, towards the bristling thorns. And the bush at once began to rustle and shiver, its horny weaponry glimmering under the moonlight with movement. Freemantle pressed on. And the thick limbs of the bush trembled and stiffened with a sound weirdly similar to an intake of breath.

Freemantle stopped. He was close enough to touch the tips of the foremost thorns. But he didn’t do that. He walked away from the bush, backwards, warily, until he was parallel with Curtis, where he stopped. When he spoke, his voice was low and had a confidential quality, as though he was afraid of being overheard.

‘I was on a manoeuvre back in the day when the objective was to evade capture living rough. This was in rural Lincolnshire. I found some outbuildings on a derelict airfield and, beggars not being choosers, bedded down for the night in one of them, an old Nissen Hut. I was woken by weeping, Tom, and there was nobody there to do it. The sound was terrible, like agony stretching back from someone wretchedly dead. I fled the place, ended up sleeping in the rain in a dry drainage ditch under a stolen tarp, having put some serious miles between me and the weeping.

‘I later learned the airfield was used by fighter pilots in the Battle of Britain. The Few?’

‘Go on.’

‘Average age nineteen. Average flying time before they clambered into a Spitfire cockpit on a combat mission, ten hours. Mortality rate at the height of the battle, sixty per cent.’

‘Your point?’

‘They were kids. They weren’t ready for death. And I heard one of them lamenting his own short life, nearly seventy years after it was taken from him.’

‘You think this place is haunted?’

‘I think some places have trouble escaping their own past. I don’t like it here. I don’t much care for Raven Dip. I don’t think you did, either.’

Curtis thought Freemantle had got that about right. He wasn’t surprised, particularly, at the line taken by the man. Most old soldiers were superstitious and most of the ones that were, when encouraged, could tell a personal story or two to substantiate what they believed.

Gibbet Mourning was an uncomfortable place. The thorn bush was ugly and odd and its great size alone would make it seem sinister. But take to it with a flame-thrower and in twenty minutes there’d be nothing left but a large scorch mark on innocent ground. And anyway, the conversation Freemantle was steering him towards was not one he was prepared to have.

He didn’t need spectral setbacks. He needed the money to be able to go to court and win the right to see his seven-year-old daughter. He needed this commission, which was of so high profile a nature it would make his name and propel him to the forefront of his esoteric profession. He would fulfil a dying man’s dream in the process.

And hadn’t Freemantle said that was what he wanted, too?

The bush bristled noisily across its entire substantial length and height, rattling and shifting in a sinuous way the wind could never accomplish. There was no wind. The fancy capered into his mind that it had heard him think about burning it and was bristling now in an ugly show of defiance.

‘Come on,’ he said to Freemantle. ‘Let’s go back. I’m done with Gibbet Mourning.’

Dinner was a relaxed affair after their quad bike jaunt. It was cooked by a pretty young oriental woman Abercrombie introduced as Jo. Judging by the number of dishes and the speed with which they were produced, Jo had some assistance in the kitchen. Either that or she was a magician. The food was fusion in character and the wines accompanying it expensive, and it occurred wryly to Curtis that he hadn’t been asked whether he had any special dietary requirements because his host already knew the answer to that question.

They ate in a spacious dining room. It was stark and rather modern, the only suggestion of flamboyant wealth provided by the paintings hung on the walls. They were originals and some of them were very recognizable, even to someone as ignorant about art as Curtis considered himself.

Francesca joined them. She hadn’t changed out of what she’d worn earlier, but she had put her hair up and her pearl earrings lustred bluely in her lobes when she moved her head on her elegant neck. The whole effect was pleasing enough to remind Curtis of the warning Freemantle had earlier given him. The bodyguard – except he was more than that – proved the point by eating with them too. And when Curtis dragged his eyes away from Francesca and looked at him across the table, he was treated to a glower he thought he probably deserved.

Saul Abercrombie entertained them until the meal was finished with episodes from his life. They were raucous tales of Jagger and Richards and Bonham and Plant and other members of the rock aristocracy from the debauched period of their pomp. Hollywood figured in Nicholson and Dunaway and De Niro, except he referred to everyone by their first names and you had to work out from the time frame and locations the person he was talking about.

It wasn’t hard to do this. But it was scandalous and shocking stuff; at least to Curtis. He was entertained and genuinely amused but couldn’t help wondering how often Freemantle had been forced to endure these boastful anecdotes. And Francesca must have grown up with it all. She would probably be able to recite her father’s outrageous stories by heart.

When the coffee had been drunk, somehow, gently, they got on to the subject of his daughter.

‘She’s called Charlotte,’ Curtis said.

Freemantle said, ‘Are you one of those Fathers for Justice?’

‘No. There are strategies other than protesting on top of a crane in a Superman suit.’

Francesca smiled at him when he said that and said, ‘Come with me, Tom. There’s something in my studio I want you to see.’

He followed her out of the dining room, Freemantle’s eyes burning like twin lasers into his back in his mind. He followed her all the way to a door at the rear of the house and then into a separate building with a roof made entirely of glass.

‘I paint using natural light,’ she explained, switching on a row of fluorescents so that they could see in the darkness. Her work was figurative, he saw from the drawing half completed on her easel. It was a boy flying a kite on a beach and to Curtis it looked very accomplished. She began to flick through a pile of stretched canvases leaning against the far wall.

‘Mostly I paint from photographs,’ she said. ‘The one I brought you here to see, I did from life.’ She paused, then pulled out a smallish canvas, a picture about three feet high and two across in size. It was a portrait, the head and shoulders of a man, and if the hair had not been so long, Curtis would have been looking at a mirror image of himself.

‘You don’t recognize it?’

‘It looks like me.’

She frowned. ‘I understood you went there today. It’s the knight from the window in the church at Raven Dip.’

‘I’ll take your word for that,’ Curtis said. ‘I didn’t really scrutinize his features. I was paying more attention to the head he was holding in his fist.’

‘You could be twins,’ Francesca said. ‘It struck me straight away. I’m amazed my father didn’t comment on it.’

‘Maybe he missed it.’

‘Don’t be fooled by the stoner vocabulary. He misses nothing. And it’s an uncanny likeness.’

‘Uncanny,’ Curtis said, the word sounding as hollow as he suddenly felt.

C
urtis spent the whole of the following morning busily engaged with his tests. The soil was as nutrient-rich as he’d expected it to be. Most of it, for most of its life in the millennium since the clearance of the original forest, had been wilderness. The land had not been worked to exhaustion under rotated crops.

It was rich in minerals and moist, a dark, loamy earth that would support the root systems of mature trees ideally. The cliffs, geologically, were a spine separating the sea from the land. A few metres inland from their granite bedrock the stone gave way to clay. And it was clay that lay under the thirty feet or so of soil covering the entirety of the area to be re-forested.

Even at the cliffs, the soil was six or seven feet deep a stride inland from the edge. Good enough for yew trees. The forest would flourish to their very brink, as it had, apparently, in ancient times, when he imaged one or two huntsmen chasing deer or boar perhaps, experiencing surprise as their last living emotion as they blundered upon the sheer drop down to the shore.

He’d have to brush up on his climbing skills. Recovery of the raw materials from the threatened places at the coastal areas he’d talked about meant abseiling and he hadn’t abseiled in a few years. His head for heights was cool enough. The rest was just checking and re-checking your gear because most abseiling fatalities were caused by carelessness in failing to notice that pitons weren’t securely hammered home or that ropes had frayed.

He surveyed the land from the seat of a quad bike, stopping occasionally, still somewhat numbed by the sheer scale of the enterprise envisioned by Saul Abercrombie. He began to calculate in his mind the manpower and machinery that would be required, the plant and the living quarters they would need to build and the logistics of recruiting and briefing and feeding the army of arboreal workers needed to transform a dream into something living and real.

It was ambitious and exciting. And it was lucrative. The previous evening Abercrombie had told him he wanted everything accomplished over a ten-week time frame. Three months at the outside, he said, joking that the extra fortnight was only available if they had to factor in some major catastrophe. Curtis’ fee for this was £250,000. If he delivered on the nail he qualified for a bonus. It was considerably more money than he had managed to earn over the past five years of his working life.

His criss-cross route across the site brought him at one point in his progress close to Gibbet Mourning. He stopped and from the saddle of the bike saw that the great thorn bush possessed in daylight almost the same menace it had in darkness. It was squat and baleful and ugly. Its branches were almost implausibly thick and fibrous and there was something anthropomorphic about them in the sunshine. They seemed like strong and sinewy limbs twisted and contorted with the promise of the pain they could inflict.

He looked at the thorns. He noticed with a shudder that in daylight several of them had the corpses of birds impaled on them. They must have flown into the horny talons of that revolting growth over the course of the night. Their feathers fluttered as they lay skewered there, sparrows and thrushes and finches hung like bloodied trophies.

For some reason he remembered then Freemantle’s joke of two mornings earlier about being up with the larks. A lot had changed since that phone conversation, but one thing hadn’t: he still wouldn’t know what a lark looked like. Maybe there was an example present in the gory tableau in front of him. But he didn’t really feel like further studying the bush.

He decided he would visit Loxley’s Cross. He calculated that it lay about four miles to the north-east of where he stood. He had seen Raven Dip and he had visited Gibbet Mourning and he wondered whether the third ancient location mapped on this wilderness would have the same sinister character of the other two. It didn’t matter, really. In a few weeks these places would be obliterated forever as the forest returned to claim its place and restore the character of the land to how it had originally been.

There was a signpost when he got there. It was so stark and solitary an object in the surrounding grassy expanse that it possessed the character, to him, of some sort of man-made anomaly. It was made of cast iron and looked as though it dated from the early nineteenth century. It was painted black and its surface was pitted by time and weather. The places it pointed to were picked out on vanes placed at right angles to one another.

The first of the vanes pointed him back towards Gibbet Mourning. The second pointed coastward, towards some forgotten destination that had once been named Puller’s Reach. Who or what a puller was, Curtis had no idea. He was a bit mystified by Loxley’s Cross. It was enigmatic and so solitary and redundant it seemed almost surreal. It pointed to nowhere anyone might ever wish to go. But it was not sinister, which was something.

Looking at it, still and black and staunch, he wondered whether the function of the signpost at Loxley’s Cross might actually be the opposite of what would generally be assumed. It might exist to warn the wary traveller against places they should not visit. He smiled to himself at that contrapuntal bit of reasoning. Then he looked at his watch. He was due back at the house for lunch at one o’clock. He had ample time. He would head for Puller’s Reach and check personally on whatever it was the sign was warning people to avoid.