He put the rifle over his shoulder and glanced around and yawned again. ‘Your dad runs a private army?’
‘Come on.’
They exited the rear of the house, the route Francesca habitually used to make her way to her studio. Her bedroom window was set in the wall to their right, when they rounded the corner, eighty or ninety metres away, closer to the front of the building. The fog was dense and palpable, almost sulphurous to breathe, like some element delivered them from a remote and darker time.
She felt there was something there, observing them. She had an inkling of something still and watchful but it had alerted her senses and raised and coarsened her skin in gooseflesh in a way that nothing merely human ever had.
Pete must have sensed it too. He put out an instinctive arm and pushed her to his own rear protectively. Practically, it was a slight she could live with. He was twice her size and she noticed he moved silently across the grey, damp ground beneath them.
Ahead of them, there was a bark of sound. It was as anguished as a death rattle and as inhuman as the shrill of wind through reeds. It pronounced her name. It struggled with the consonants. But it was unmistakeably her name that reverberated through the folds of mist.
Pete raised his rifle. He chambered a round. He swung the barrel from left to right in a long, chest-height lateral sweep. He swung it back again, alert to sound, seeking a solid target in all the groping blindness before them. She observed that the weapon was rock steady in his grip.
‘There’s nothing there,’ he said, eventually.
‘There was, though.’
‘Yes, there was. It spoke your name. But whatever it was is gone now.’
T
hey took a Land Rover to the spot where Eddie Stanhope’s boys had built the airstrip and helipad. The five of them breakfasted together first and it was decided that they’d explore Pete’s cave once Curtis, with Pete’s help, had finally eradicated the thorn bush at Gibbet Mourning. When they’d completed that bit of unfinished business, Pete could return in the vehicle they were taking out and Curtis could return the one Freemantle had left there.
Curtis got the impression over his wholemeal toast and Marmite that Abercrombie never really expected to see his estate manager again. It was a mysterious and possibly ominous state of affairs but in an ironic way quite fitting. Soon there would be no estate for him to manage. There would instead be a huge forest for which his skill-set was not required.
After they’d told Francesca about the cave, she told them about the nocturnal interlude she’d shared with Pete. Dora stressed Pete’s terror in his brief exploration of the cavern in the cliff face. She played the story for laughs and got them from everyone, except Francesca. When Francesca related her story, she seemed determined to portray Pete as someone possessed of a cool and laconic courage.
‘He’s schizophrenic,’ Curtis said, who thought that Pete might be on the way to making a conquest.
‘The mark on the glass was a freaky incidence of condensation,’ Abercrombie said. ‘Not even that freaky, when you consider how often people claim to see the face of Christ in a soiled dishcloth or on a potato chip. The noise you heard was some nocturnal creature you disturbed. This is a wilderness, remember? We’re the interlopers here, not the other way around.’
The fog had thinned slightly by the time they set off for the rendezvous with Stanhope. Curtis called him first just to make sure that the conditions on the ground allowed for the scheduled chopper flight. He was told they did. He remembered his letter to Charlotte, which was buttoned into his jacket pocket.
Curtis drove. He released the handbrake and depressed the clutch and eased the transmission into gear. After a minute, he said, ‘The thing is, I never know where I stand, do I, Pete? I mean which Pete’s sitting beside me? Is it the trembling, cowardly Pete, or Pete the dashing hero? From one minute to the next, how the hell am I supposed to know?’
‘Very bloody funny, not. Did you notice Saul this morning?’
‘Of course I did. He’s our boss.’
‘I mean did you notice how he looked? He looked terrible.’
‘Don’t try to change the subject. Where did last night’s alpha male stuff come from? Was it just showing off?’
‘I had back-up. And I had a rifle in my hands.’
‘Get you, Annie Oakley.’
‘That would be a more fitting name for Fran. She was packing the pistol. And it’s probably escaped your notice, Tom, but she’s female.’
‘So it’s Fran, is it?’
Pete shrugged tightly, staring straight ahead at the featureless view through the windscreen.
‘I’m only kidding, mate. I haven’t had a chance to do much of that over the last few weeks. It’s really good to have you here.’
Pete didn’t reply for a moment. Then he said, ‘I’d say it’s really good to be here, Tom. But I’ve got my doubts and they’re getting more serious all the time.’
‘What do you think that was, in the fog?’
‘I haven’t got a fucking clue. But I can tell you she didn’t imagine it. Whatever it was, it was out there. Fingers trailed that mark left on her bedroom window. I’m not saying they were human fingers, but that mark was left by a hand.’
In his breast pocket, Curtis felt his mobile start to vibrate. He asked Pete to take the call. There was zero chance of being caught doing it, but out of ingrained habit, he never used his cellular when he drove.
‘He’s driving,’ Pete said into the phone, flatly. He listened for a while. Eventually he said, ‘I’ll tell him. Goodbye.’
‘There’s little about you more heart-warmingly impressive than your phone manner,’ Curtis said. ‘Who was it?’
‘Some bloke called Carrington, sounded about a hundred and fifty years old. Said it was important you looked up the story of the Crawley family and what happened to them. They lived at Loxley’s Cross in Victorian times. He probably knew them personally. Why are you so cheerful this morning?’
‘Because of what we’re going to do when we get what it is we’re picking up from Eddie Stanhope,’ Curtis said.
‘A bit of routine clearance has got you this excited? Since when have you been a pyromaniac?’
‘It isn’t routine clearance,’ Curtis said. ‘It’s personal. Andrew Carrington, right?’
‘Professor Andrew Carrington, yeah, and the family were the Crawleys. He said the info’s in the public domain. He said you can get it doing an Internet search.’
‘And this is important, now, more than a century after the events?’
‘Vital, was the word he used,’ Pete said.
Curtis shook his head. The big diggers were due imminently. Trees were scheduled to start arriving by road and rail and air. A workforce so substantial it required its own quartermaster to keep it stocked in food rations and soap and toilet rolls was about to take up residence in a purpose-built village and begin the serious toil of planting.
The air would be alive with the judder of heavy machines and the calls and commands of labouring men and women. They would churn and sweat and upheave and transform. And he was supposed to find the time to research a Victorian family who had once lived on a part of Abercrombie’s land.
He supposed he could do it, if he remembered to. He had found the time to write to Charlotte. That had been important. But he was prepared to waste that very afternoon with what he now thought of as Dora Straub’s Cavern Club.
They were there. Under the fog, with its landing lights and neatly painted navigation signage, the smooth expanse of the strip looked so immaculate and out of place it seemed altogether surreal.
Dora felt slightly resentful that Pete had been Tom’s default choice as deputy in the thorn bush assignment. It was a routine task and it was physical in nature but she was hardly what the British called a shrinking violet. She was strong and capable and confident handling equipment and machinery. And she hadn’t had a chance to have Tom to herself for a moment since her arrival.
It was true that she had a more cerebral, even spiritual approach to the whole subject of forestry than Pete Mariner did. Her great-grandfather had been a fairly high-ranking member of the Nazi military elite. He had hunted deer and wild boar with Goering. He had shared Goering’s semi-mystical faith in the cultural and folkloric power of woodland. The Aryan paganism they had begun to explore back then had set great store by woodland traditions and beliefs.
She didn’t discuss this family influence on her thinking. She knew it would be stupid and even self-destructive to do so. It would cost her the position she valued at the university. Professionally, it might lead to her being ostracized. But it was there, undeniable and ineradicable in her bloodline and subconscious mind.
None of this interest in and empathy for the spiritual aspect of the forest affected her ability to carry out practical tasks. She thought Tom had chosen Pete, influenced by Pete’s gung-ho reaction to the intruder Francesca had imagined was outside her room. It was easy, to her mind, to put on a bold display of courage when you not only carried a loaded gun but knew your protagonist was illusory. Faced by what he regarded as real danger, in the cave in the cliff face, Pete had simply fled.
She’d wanted to at least see the great bush at Gibbet Mourning Tom had described before its destruction. It had sounded to her like an intriguing hybrid. She suspected someone had bred and planted it there for a purpose. That purpose would now go undiscovered and she was a woman who liked to get to the bottom of botanical and biological mysteries.
The fog was thinning. Francesca was painting in her studio. Saul had departed for his comms room after breakfast saying he needed to deal with what he called the fallout from the newspaper story about the project they were here to facilitate. A delegation was threatening to turn up at the gates: a mixed interest group of naturalists, ramblers, local politicians, curious neighbours and even an environmental historian. Dora hadn’t been aware that such an academic specialism even existed.
She could sit smoking on the terrace, which was all she had done since breakfast finished. She could stare out at the limited view allowed by that light blanket of grey. Or she could do something worthwhile in the time before their planned exploration of the cave.
She decided that she would take a quad and go and look again at the cairn of stones at Puller’s Reach. She wanted to examine the second yew tree, the one Tom was insistent had not been planted there deliberately. Amid the tipsy show-boating of the previous evening’s visit, she had not really examined that mystery as thoroughly as she felt she should have.
She wanted too to get a real, authentic feel for the land. She had not thought the British Isles possessed the space for a wilderness like that which Abercrombie owned, bordering the sea on a vast western flank and reaching and stretching for miles inland. But then this was her first visit to Wales. She tended to work on the delicate and the carefully nurtured, like the recent job on Wight or the job on Jersey when she had first met her two companions here. This was a desolate place, a task of historic magnitude.
It was also an ancient place. Yews had seemed fitting species in their lonely spot at the edge of the sea. The cairn had hinted at a dark and secretive past. She would enjoy Puller’s Reach on her own. She felt in no danger, at no risk whatsoever of physical harm here. It was an empathetic location. And Dora was a woman who revelled in her own company.
They stood beside the helipad with Stanhope and a couple of his boys and when they heard the rotors judder overhead, the boys went to either side of the pad and triggered flares. The flames burst into orange incandescence and the aircraft descended in a shit-storm of downdraft that Curtis thought might dispel the mist further. With the whump and vibration of the rotor blades and smoke from the flares blowing acridly about the place, it was difficult to tell.
There were protective suits and masks along with the flame throwers when they unloaded and unpacked the crate. The suits were flame and heat retardant and of the slightly cumbersome one-size-fits-all variety. Curtis and Pete Mariner climbed into them.
There were asbestos-lined gauntlets too, but these were a relatively snug fit, necessary because the manipulation of the petroleum jets was a delicate business. It required no real skill or even much experience. Basically you pointed and triggered. But it needed to be done precisely because of the throw of the flames and the ferocity of the temperature involved. It wouldn’t do to be careless in what they were about to attempt. Fire maimed and destroyed and nothing could survive the heat this kind of hardware was built to generate.
They tossed their helmets into the back of the Land Rover, where the flame throwers had already been carefully placed. Curtis congratulated Stanhope on the work his outfit had accomplished. They were actually finishing ahead of schedule. He took out the letter he’d addressed to his daughter and asked if Stanhope could post it, a request met with an immediate promise to do so at the first opportunity. They shook hands, Curtis got back behind the wheel, and he and Pete were off on their way to Gibbet Mourning.
Had it not been for the fog, he perhaps wouldn’t have noticed. But the fog was persistent and still dense in some clinging banks and drifts, and so he had fed the coordinates into the GPS on his smart phone.
The thorn bush was not where it was supposed to be. It no longer squatted balefully at the spot Freemantle had told Curtis was Gibbet Mourning. Nothing, from within the Land Rover, distinguished that location from any other.
When they got out of the vehicle, they saw signs of where it had been. There was a scatter of feathers and the corpses of a hundred or more small and pitiful birds. There was the wrench from the ground of a deep and solitary root system. But the thorns, the menacing presence that had defined the place and given it its spiteful character, were gone. All that was left was the vague smell of chlorophyll, a taint of avian decomposition, the pungency of torn earth.
‘This is too fucking weird,’ Curtis said. He’d found Freemantle’s ride. It was the vehicle that looked like it had moved, because it was nowhere near the landmark it had halted close to. It was equipped with wheels. It was designed to travel to places. But it hadn’t. The thorn bush had.