The Memory of Trees (15 page)

They first went to Raven Dip and then to Loxley’s Cross. There was no real logic to this except that the Dip was just that, a depression that could hide the presence of someone there. And the Cross was somewhere that led to places and so seemed marginally less barren than the wastes of grassland around them distinguished by no name at all.

The Land Rover was the same green as the ground and so naturally camouflaged. Against the background of the thorn bush it couldn’t be seen at all until you were almost upon it, Curtis realized, wondering why Freemantle had parked it quite so close to the great thorn tangle dominating the ground.

He thought he had his answer when they looked in the back of the vehicle and saw the red jerry can strapped upright in a bracket there. When he freed and hefted it, he discovered it was full. Freemantle had come here to do some damage to the bush, maybe to scorch it out of existence. So where was he and why hadn’t he accomplished this relatively straightforward task?

‘Over here,’ Abercrombie said, still astride his quad bike, gesturing at the ground. Curtis walked across. He saw a shotgun lying in a tangle of grass. It was a pump-action, heavy calibre, probably a sixteen-bore and had been beautifully maintained up to the moment of its abandonment. There was a polished lustre to the walnut stock and the metal glimmered without tarnish in the spring light.

There were several spent cartridges littering the ground in the vicinity of the gun. Curtis was no firearms expert, but judging from where they lay, they had been expelled during one long, sustained burst of fire. He looked up at the sky. Had Freemantle been firing at a bird?

There were estate managers who would down a sea eagle without any qualms if they thought they could get away with it. But they tended to be the jealous protectors of livestock or game birds on land where organized shoots represented the day-to-day business of the place. Freemantle had no farm beasts to care for or stock of pheasants to protect from a predator. And there were more than twenty spent cartridges when he counted them. He reckoned on Freemantle being a better marksman than that, aiming at something big and low in flight.

Maybe he’d been shooting at the bush itself, he thought, looking at the intense, writhed tangle of thorns, with its feathery blossoming of dead sparrows and finches.
Up with the larks
, he thought, remembering Freemantle’s joke on the phone the first time they had spoken.

It was insane to think that. It was also impossible. The shotgun would have done some serious damage at such close range aimed at the thorn bush. It would have been a target impossible to miss and yet here it was, squatting and massive, dense and quite intact, still and somehow poised in a way that made him feel disgustedly that he ought to take the can of fuel and finish the job Freemantle hadn’t had the opportunity to start.

He couldn’t do that. He couldn’t even pick the shotgun or the spent cartridge cases up off the ground. This could be a crime scene. ‘Should we call the police?’

‘No,’ Abercrombie said. ‘Sam’s a guy who can take care of himself. I don’t want filth on any land with my name on its title deeds. I couldn’t handle that, brother.’

Curtis remembered then the picture of the arrest back in the seventies in Red Lion Square. Saul had been dragged away from the demo by officers with truncheons and riot shields. He’d seen the Old Bailey from the defendant’s perspective before spending six months behind bars in Brixton gaol. Maybe the scars of that experience had been slow to heal. Maybe they hadn’t healed at all.

‘Freemantle came here to torch the thorn bush,’ he said. ‘It’s something we discussed on the night you got him to bring me here, when I said I was curious to see the place called Gibbet Mourning. My thinking is that he could have been followed here and then confronted.’

Abercrombie said, ‘Followed by whom?’

‘You’re a wealthy man, Saul. This is an isolated spot. Could be anyone from a poacher to an investigative journalist, but my money would be on something like a Balkan kidnap gang. Eastern criminals are coming to Britain because they think the pickings are easy. What if you’re an abduction target and they needed to deal with Sam before nabbing you?’

‘You sound like an opinion piece in the
Daily Mail
.’

‘And you’re not naïve. Think about it.’

‘Sam would have hit two or three of them, taken them out,’ Abercrombie said. ‘We’d be looking at corpses. At the least, we’d be looking at casualties. Look around you. There isn’t even the residue of a fire fight. There’s no blood, no muscle or bone tissue, no clothing fragments, not even any spent ammo apart from the stuff a single gun discharged and Sam was holding that one.’

‘He fired it at something.’

But Abercrombie merely shrugged.

Curtis was quiet for a moment. He did Abercrombie’s bidding and looked around. The wind was slight, but the thorn bush stirred in it. Its branches brushed and cracked like the sly loosening of stiff, inhuman limbs.

‘You won’t even think about the police?’

Again, Abercrombie said, ‘Sam’s a big boy. He can take care of himself.’

‘There’s another reason.’

‘Yes, Tree Man, there is. Not everyone takes my enlightened approach to the rehabilitation of offenders.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Sam Freemantle did five years for armed robbery. He did the crime, brother, and boy, did he do the time. But it means he couldn’t get a gun license, not now and not ever. There’s some serious hardware in the basement of the house and not one item of it is held legally.’

‘That’s just fucking stupid.’

‘I know. I know it is,’ Abercrombie said, climbing carefully out of his saddle and stooping stiffly to retrieve the weapon from the ground. ‘But I really didn’t figure, Tree Man, on mysterious shit like this.’

His mobile rang then and Curtis answered it. It was Francesca. He glanced back at the bush, behind him, because he sensed some movement there that was furtive and unnatural, deliberate, mindful somehow rather than determined only by the strength of the breeze. When he looked, though, it was still. It was crafty, wasn’t it? He had almost caught it out but it had been too cunning for him. It was a ridiculous train of thought but one that made him shiver as he said goodbye to his caller.

‘Dora has arrived,’ he said. ‘She’s taking a shower before unpacking and Francesca is having a late salad lunch prepared for her. She wants to know whether we’ll be joining them for their meal. It’ll be served in about an hour.’

‘Call her back and tell her yes,’ Abercrombie said. He was retrieving spent shotgun cartridges from the ground and putting them into his jacket pockets. What he was doing, Curtis thought, was removing evidence.

‘An hour gives us time to stop off at Puller’s Reach before we head back. I want to check on my yew tree.’

‘Your yew tree will be fine.’

‘I know. But I want to see it. That reporter’s nosing around is a hassle I don’t need and I’m worried too about Sam. I need cheering up, brother. I need to have my spirits lifted if I’m to meet the lovely Dora in any kind of disposition to act like a proper host.’

‘You’re her employer.’

‘I’ve seen her picture. I intend to flirt with her, if she’s as captivating as she looks. Call it the privilege of a dying man, but I feel entitled.’

Curtis laughed. He had to.

Abercrombie let go of a long breath and came across and punched him playfully on the chest. ‘A man takes his compensations where he can,’ he said.

Pete Mariner was lost. There were euphemisms such as side-tracked and diverted. But they were bullshit, really, he thought, taking out his phone and trying the SatNav app for the umpteenth time. But the SatNav didn’t know where the fuck he was and, frankly, neither did Pete.

He’d opted to bike the distance to the Abercrombie estate in Pembrokeshire. He’d decided on this because he looked pretty good in motorcycle leathers and it was a dashing way to travel that might possibly make an impression on Dora. He didn’t think he had ever succeeded in making an impression on Dora before. Now was definitely the time. Arriving astride his 1200cc beast of a bike, with its gleaming chrome and throaty purr, was definitely the way.

He had headed west and hit the coast because the weather was benign and if you were going to endure the discomfort of a bike, you might as well enjoy the benefits. Coastal roads tended to wind entertainingly in both the vertical and horizontal planes. They were not heavily used like trunk roads were. They offered exhilarating views. There was the bracing salt breeze and since Abercrombie’s domain stretched to the edge of the sea, how far wrong could he go?

The problem was that he had run out of road. His tyres were now on packed sand. To his right there was a ragged expanse of grass that looked like the rough of a golf links, except that it stretched as far as he could see. To his left, a hundred metres away, was the water. Waves were breaking gently against the shore. In that direction, westward, eventually was Ireland. If he kept on travelling north, he had to reach his destination. He figured on the basis of the mileage he’d done that he couldn’t be more than a dozen miles away from it.

He rode slowly in second gear, watchful for anything that could chew his expensive tyres and so strand him punctured on a remote stretch of coastline. He had his phone and it had plenty of battery life but the need to be located and rescued didn’t form any part of his plans. Dora would be unimpressed by that particular dilemma.

Women like Dora never needed to be rescued. It was a plight she would rightly consider ridiculous. She wouldn’t even find it funny. She had many attributes, but a sense of humour wasn’t prominent among them. So he rode deliberately and studied the sand and shingle route before him, not really noticing the contour of the land rising to his right until it was a cliff wall about eighty feet high.

When he did notice this change in the topography, he braked and scrutinized the cliff face. It was the solid granite rampart Tom Curtis had described to him. If he wasn’t yet on Abercrombie’s land, he was surely close to it. The cliffs were getting higher. In places Tom had remarked that they rose to 200 feet. He whistled, getting a sense for the first time of the vastness and remoteness of the area they were going to be altering so fundamentally in character.

Before him, about 800 metres distant, was a headland. He couldn’t see beyond that. He began to feel a little uneasy about running out of beach. He didn’t know to what height or even at what time of day the tide came in. He didn’t know whether it extended to the cliffs themselves and if it did, to what depth. He didn’t want to subject his beloved bike to a salt-water soaking that would ruin its engine. Its twin panniers were packed with his precious stuff. Most importantly, he didn’t want to drown.

Pete decided that he would see what was beyond the headland. He would make a decision then as to whether to press on or return the way he’d come. There was no way he could get the bike up the cliffs. His best strategy might be to double-back to the grassland a few miles to his rear and then ride inland parallel to where he was riding now. That way he’d eventually find the perimeter fence Tom had described and he could follow that until it led him to a gate.

The headland was just a promontory. Beyond it more cliffs stretched in a ragged northerly sweep. Such was the isolation of the place that it was easy for Pete to imagine himself the only person in this pale, still world. He couldn’t really hear anything. The rumble of his bike’s engine was more vibration than sound inside his cushioned, full-face helmet.

He switched off his ignition and swung out the bike’s stand with a booted foot. He took off his helmet and rested it on the saddle. He did this because he had seen something he hadn’t expected to in the granite contours of the cliff. It was a cave mouth, and he thought he would take a look at the cave interior because it would offer clues as to when and to what height the tide encroached.

The entrance was a black and empty arch shape in an oblique facet of rock. It was about eight feet high and about six across and the angle of the rock meant that it could only really be seen when you faced it directly. Move even a few metres to the south or north of it and the opening became invisible.

Caves were dangerous places. That was true even when they weren’t sited at the foot of cliffs in remote locations at the edge of the sea. It was extremely foolish to explore a cave alone, without the right equipment, unprepared and without having informed anyone about your intentions.

He wouldn’t explore very far. He’d look for rock pools and seaweed. If he found beach detritus like driftwood and boat debris, he’d scarper back the way he’d come as quickly as he dared ride having learned all he needed to about the tide’s treacherous reach.

The cave maintained the dimensions of its entrance as he walked into it. It might have narrowed slightly, but he didn’t have to crouch. He could stand upright. The walls were smooth and parallel, but the route into the rock was not straight. After about eighty metres the cave veered quite sharply to the left and then swung to the right, its shape effectively blocking off the light from the entrance and casting Pete suddenly, as he rounded the second of the two curves, into total darkness.

The only light source he had was the torch app on his phone. He switched that on and played the beam around the space he was in, painting light on to stone. The beam did not illuminate very much of whatever space lay in front of him. It was quiet, profoundly silent in a way that made him retrospectively aware of the noises he had not noticed on the shore a minute earlier: the breaking of shallow waves, the cries of seagulls flying above, the light ruffle of the breeze at the edge of the sea.

Then he heard something. It sounded like a splash and it came from a distance further inside the cave he could not accurately have judged. He listened for it to repeat and it did. It wasn’t a splash at all but a sort of wet thud, like something soft and fleshy slapping heavily against stone.

He swallowed. He thought it was probably a seal. He listened and heard it again and though he didn’t know how far away it was, thought that it sounded quite significantly closer. And he could smell it now. A faint odour of fishy decay was drifting out of the darkness towards him. It smelled cold and dead but the dead aspect was contradicted when he heard whatever was making the noise thump forward again towards him.