They talked about the first tree shipments and Curtis briefed Abercrombie on the characters of his principal lieutenants, Dora Straub and Pete Mariner. He seemed more intrigued by the former than the latter, which Curtis thought understandable.
Everything had been thought of, from the small lab they would need to ensure none of their trees were contaminated to the banks of portable latrines the on-site workforce would require. Curtis had done all of this stuff before, just never on such a gigantic scale.
‘They won’t all be of a piece, Saul.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘A mature forest is a constant cycle of decline and death and regeneration. Each species of tree possesses a lifespan.’
‘I know that.’
‘We’ll be planting everything from fully mature oaks to silver-birch saplings. It won’t be neat and uniform, like a plantation of farmed conifers.’
‘But it will look real?’
‘It will, inevitably, because it will be real, totally authentic, exactly as in nature.’
‘Cool. I got the right guy when I got you, Tree Man. I know I did. I should congratulate myself.’
Eventually, Saul Abercrombie tired. There was still no sign of Sam Freemantle. He smiled, rose stiffly and nodded a goodnight. Curtis smiled back and looked at the pale suds in the bottom of his beer glass on the table they’d shared, then glanced up at the dark vista before him, thinking of the violent, epic upheaval to which this quiet wilderness would be subjected over the coming days, weeks and months.
He didn’t feel regretful about it. He didn’t even feel ambivalent. There was something unlovely about the acreage Abercrombie owned, a baleful quality beyond its vastness. It was a place where things seemed to lurk and hide and to have qualities other than those they ought rightfully to possess.
That was true of the cairn of stones at Puller’s Reach. It was true of the iron sign signalling the route to nowhere at Loxley’s Cross. It was true of the church at Raven Dip, where the interior felt as soullessly cold as the stone of its ancient walls and flagged floor. It was truest of all perhaps at Gibbet Mourning, where that fibrous, cantankerous cluster of thorns had stretched and swollen to such monstrous dimensions. This was a blighted place, and churning it up and transforming it could only improve its character.
Mature trees were stately and serene. Nothing in nature possessed their quiet, stoic dignity. They were beautiful and benevolent. The forest would be grand and varied, and its woodland wildlife would thrive unhindered through the decades and even the centuries to come. It would be a place, despite its great size, of peace and reflection.
He thought about Gregory of Avalon. Had there ever been such a person, a slayer of dragons, deliberately seeking the mouth to the cave where the monsters dwelt on his approach from the sea? And he remembered the thing he had sensed on the shore below him in the mist as he clung to tussocks of grass at the edge of the cliff. He remembered the flop on the shingle of its blind progress and the assaulting stink of it in his nostrils.
A wildlife issue, he’d told Saul Abercrombie an hour or so afterwards.
The beast of Bodmin Moor, Abercrombie had joked, which he’d known full well it wasn’t.
They’d told him everything and nothing tonight. Except he didn’t think they’d told him everything they knew and he knew they’d told him nothing he could quite believe in. He looked at his wristwatch and saw that the time was a quarter past eleven. It was curious that Sam Freemantle was coming back so late. A pint enjoyed in a village pub en route, maybe. He was a grown man and entitled. Curtis reached for his own beer glass, which he would rinse in the kitchen before retiring to his room and a peaceful sleep.
Francesca had admitted that she didn’t like Sam. Not in so many words, but the meaning had been plain. Did it also mean by implication that she liked him? It was flattering if she did, but no more than that. Whatever his motive in offering it, Curtis thought Freemantle’s advice over any dalliance with the boss’s daughter basically sound. Anyway, he had no appetite for romance.
David Baxter rose early and did his daily search for Tom Curtis as soon as his laptop had powered up. His assignment had been completed formally the previous day when he’d written up his report on Isobel Jenks and her version of events concerning the affair she’d had with Curtis and its fall-out.
He’d emailed that as a Word document to his employer. The fee for the job had cleared in his account. But curiosity informed much of what he did and he was still curious to know what it was that connected a tree expert so closely to Abercrombie Industries that Saul Abercrombie had felt the need to have the man so thoroughly investigated.
He got his answer after an hour of Internet probing. Three machines were en route from the docks at Hamburg to the Welsh port of Fishguard. They were gigantic contraptions, excavators generally used for the laying of pipelines deep under the earth when security or environmental concerns deemed the need for their concealment. They were so large that a separate cargo vessel had been chartered to carry each of them.
The name on the bills of lading was that of Tom Curtis. And Curtis had been busy elsewhere outside of Europe. He’d been active in North America and Canada where he’d been quoted prices for deciduous trees. The quotes looked competitive to Baxter’s untrained eye. You could get quite a lot of tree for your dollar. Even more surprising were the quantities. Curtis was inquiring about hundreds of thousands of tons of live lumber.
Baxter was quite good at putting two and two together. But as the scale of the project began to become clear to him, he was also slightly incredulous. It was a mad scheme, a megalomaniac’s folly. It was also a sensational story waiting to be written because he was damn sure he hadn’t read a word about it so far in a single newspaper.
He had a contact in the newsroom of
the Mirror
. It was a relationship he was careful to nurture. Will Davies was a good reporter with a journalist’s belligerent instinct for protecting his sources. Baxter could do Davies a favour confident that the tip-off would never be sourced back to him. Confident also that Davies would one day reciprocate.
He used his pay-as-you-go phone to call Davies and outlined what he’d discovered. He gave him the human-interest stuff he’d learned about Curtis too.
‘Just colour, Will, but worth knowing, I reckon. It’s not redundant information.’
‘There’s no such thing, mate,’ Davies said.
‘Watch out for a bloke called Freemantle if you do any door-stepping down in Pembrokeshire. He did five years for armed robbery and has a coke habit I don’t reckon is quite as far behind him as his boss would like to believe.’
‘Do you have a contact number for Isobel Jenks?’
‘I do, as it goes. You’re going to talk to her?’
‘Pursue every angle, mate. This is a biggie. I owe you large if it’s got the legs I think it has.’
It was funny, Baxter reflected, when he ended the call. Two privately educated middle-class men obliged by fashion to communicate like the bastard offspring of extras from an episode of
The Sweeney
. Such were the paradoxes of the modern world. He shut down his computer, put on his kit, strapped on his heart-rate monitor and ran around Richmond Park for an hour.
Twice, he thought he saw Isobel Jenks. The first time her pale and sinewy little body and bleached crop receded into a ripple of reeds atop a pond so he didn’t need to convince himself it was a trick of light and shade. And preoccupation, he thought. Some tricks were played in the mind.
The second sighting was more disturbing. She resolved herself out of a smudge as he approached a tree uphill, leaning against the trunk and smoking in a parka with the hood up, framing her pert features as she stared hard at him. He paused to wipe a stinging droplet of sweat from his eye and when he looked again, still a hundred feet away, she had vanished.
He was a student to her from Richmond. She couldn’t be stalking him, could she? He had given her no address at which to reach him and she’d have been going on a false identity. Had it been her, she would have confronted him, wouldn’t she? What was the point of seeking someone out and then being too timid to communicate? She hadn’t exactly struck him as shy.
He had showered and changed by the time he noticed that he’d had a call while he was out on the pay-as-you-go. No message had been left but he recognized the number. It was Will Davies’ cellular.
‘Mate,’ he said.
‘How close were you to Isobel Jenks, Dave?’
Neither tone nor tense struck Baxter as right. He swallowed. His skin felt cold and tingled. The phone shook slightly, responding to a sudden tremor in his grip. ‘I wasn’t,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t close to her at all. Why?’
‘She topped herself last night. Hanged herself by a bootlace from a hook in her college room. She left a note, the contents not divulged, obviously.’
‘You don’t know what it said?’
‘Not officially, no. Someone would have had to tell me and that would have been a breach of protocol because it’s privileged information.’
‘So what did she say?’
‘Something to the effect that her work was accomplished, Dave. She said she had finished what she’d been meant to.’
‘You’re going to follow this up?’
‘Just putting you in the picture, mate. The forest is the story. It’s fucking huge. And so’s Saul Abercrombie. There’s a rumour about Abercrombie’s health, something filed by a stringer in New York in September of last year I need to try to verify.’
‘Good luck with it, Will. Keep me in the picture.’
‘That’s a given, buddy.’
Baxter walked from his sitting room, where he’d picked up the call, into his study, where he sat at his desk before his closed laptop and stared out of the window he faced. The view was neutral. Semi-detached houses confronted him across a tree-lined street sparse of traffic once the commute to the office and the school run were done.
She hadn’t hanged herself. Hanging was carried out by skilled executioners like Albert Pierrepoint, the last man paid to do the job in Britain. They were professionals who knew how to tie a proper noose. They calibrated the drop necessary to have their bodyweight cleanly break the neck of their subject and kill them pretty much instantaneously.
The wait for the moment standing over the trap door was an ordeal, the fitting of the rope and the canvas hood over the head while you waited further ordeals. Traditional hangings had generally been the punishment for a capital crime, after all. But in the moment of execution, hanging correctly accomplished was a relatively merciful way to kill someone.
When prisoners who couldn’t stomach confinement hanged themselves from the bars of their cells with strips of bed linen or rolled towels, it was totally different. Their deaths did not involve a broken neck. It was slower because they suffocated or strangled themselves into extinction.
That’s what Isobel Jenks had done. She’d done it from a coat hook with a bootlace. He’d seen the boots he assumed the lace had come from – Doc Martens – placed at the end of her bed. They’d been recently polished.
Baxter shook his head. It was a shock because it made no sense to him. Choking away your own life was not a cry for help. It was a slow and certain death demonstrating only contempt for your existence. Isobel hadn’t struck him as someone self-destructive or even really lacking in self-esteem. On the contrary, she’d been possessed of the cocky self-regard that had prompted her indignant call to Sarah Bourne after what she considered to be Tom Curtis’s betrayal of her.
He could still taste her; taste the memory of her and the scent of her too, sweating slightly and toiling under him as they shared a farewell fuck slightly less than twenty-four hours earlier. He would need to make a voluntary statement to the police. They’d likely find traces of his semen still inside her at the autopsy. They’d be carrying that out now, wouldn’t they?
He shook his head and smiled a pained smile to himself. It was a mystery. He had seen no sign and yet he made a living from being intuitive. Should he see her again, he would try to have the presence of mind to ask her about why she had done it. He thought that he might see her again. He couldn’t rule it out. He was pretty certain now that it had been the dead Isobel he had seen staring at him in Richmond Park that morning.
A
ndrew Carrington learned about the girl’s death because he was copied into the group email warning faculty staff members not to talk to the press about her character or speculate on the reason for her suicide. There was to be a meeting concerning this unfortunate event at eleven thirty that morning. Since he hadn’t taught her, his attendance wasn’t mandatory. But the email implied that everyone who’d had contact with her should try to be there. He had given a second opinion on an essay she had written about woodland clearance in Scotland; about the economic consequences and the ecological damage inflicted.
He’d thought the essay rather good. She’d had a clear gift for analysis and a forthright prose style. She had also shown a bias for unspoiled country that was more ideological than the soupy romanticism that compelled students to decorate their walls with Arthur Rackham posters depicting elves and faeries cavorting under ferns and toadstools.
Woodland clearance wasn’t strictly his field. But over the past term he’d marked a number of history essays and appraised an English Literature student’s thesis on the fiction of Tolkien. Budget shortfalls meant that academics these days were in the business of multi-tasking just like people in the wider world.
Practically, the fact that he was copied into the message meant that they weren’t thinking of dispensing with him any time soon. The girl’s death was obviously sad but this was reassuring. The work the university put his way was part-time but essential to his lifestyle. He could not manage on his Oxford College pension and the trickle of royalties from his books without imposing strict economies on himself. So at the appointed time he walked into the seminar room in which the meeting was to be held with a jaunty step and an uncharacteristically generous smile.