He progressed. And the world he knew retreated at his back. The fog seemed to thicken, slyly increasing in density. And the silence became more profound, deadening his tread over the earth and the noise of his breathing.
It seemed an eternity before he saw the tree. His sense of direction had always been excellent and the fog had thrown him off only a few degrees so that he came first upon the dim green cluster of pebbles that was the cairn, before looking to his left and seeing the green cone of the tree, anaemic and still in its solitary spot on the cliff top.
The cairn made no sound. The stillness of the fog had silenced it, he thought, grateful to be spared its shrill and gleeful crooning. He tried to make out the sea, but there was nothing in the space where the land ceased but greyness. Fog filled the void with its dumb emptiness. The sight and the thought made him feel momentarily lonely. Then he went back to feeling the trepidation that had grown with every step taken towards his destination since he’d climbed off the bike.
It had got worse, hadn’t it? He recalled the feeling he’d had after clambering down the cliff face to the beach. Such a climb would likely be fatal in these conditions, but he felt it again, didn’t he? He felt scrutinized, watched. And he did not think the study friendly or even neutral. The watcher felt to him wholly like a powerful physical threat.
He eased through the pale blur of the yew’s branches and felt the solidity of its trunk. He ran fingers over the wrinkles in the bark. The tree was substantial and secure, something real and solid in a world reduced by the fog to speculation and whatever menace it hid. He felt it in the raised hair and chill on his skin.
The cairn emitted a sound, then. It was sudden and short and sounded to Curtis’ ears like a chuckle of laughter. He shivered, his hand recoiled from the rough surface of the tree he stood next to and he tried and failed to rationalize what his ears had just registered. He hadn’t imagined it, had he? No, he hadn’t. The spirit evoked by the cairn, the capering phantom it stood in stone tribute to had judged him and found him absurdly wanting. It had laughed at him; at his blindness and at the terror gripping him.
Something splashed below him on the shore, at the edge of the sea. It sounded large, whatever was doing the splashing. He heard a sort of sucking noise as something that sounded bulky and soft blindly gained the shore and clambered closer over the shingle.
Curtis sank to all fours and crawled the six feet to the brink of the cliff. He could see nothing below him when he reached it. There was that weird sucking sound and a rising smell of something so foul it made him retch and stung his nostrils. Then there was a scream and the scream was altogether inhuman, a wet wail too deep and savage to emanate from any human throat; too prolonged in the mournful outrage of its fury and pain.
The world went silent again. Curtis rolled on his back in frustration. He turned his head to his left and thought he saw the outline of the cairn, silent and innocent now, more clearly than he had before. The fog was lifting. When he turned back to the view from the cliff edge – where the view ought to be – he could make out white foam on anaemic pebbles where the waves broke below him. But as the view gained detail, there was no beast to see crawling, reeking from the sea.
The fog disappeared. The world clarified.
Freemantle did four sets of twenty bicep curls to end his workout in the gym. The gym was one of three rooms occupying the basement of the property the new guy hadn’t been shown. It was the biggest of the three. The others were the comms room and the armoury.
He dropped his dumbbells to the rubber floor with a thud and decided on a couple of rounds on the heavy bag. It was an addition to his usual routine but he felt like throwing some leather. He pulled on a pair of bag gloves and did three rounds, shaking the 100lb bag with each heavy blow on the chain it hung from, the staccato thud of his punches echoing around the room.
When he finished and pulled off the gloves, he saw that friction had rubbed raw the skin from the two most prominent knuckles of his right fist. He should have wound bandages to prevent the friction from doing that but he hadn’t. Hitting the bag had been a spontaneous urge. Wrapping bandages was a laborious task. The lost skin was an only slightly painful tribute to the weight of his shots.
The gym was there because Saul Abercrombie had not really believed the prognosis when his specialist had determined it. Instead, he’d sought a second opinion that transpired to be just as bleak.
He still didn’t believe it. Most people thought that doctors were somehow God-like. They had the power, didn’t they, of life over death? Surgeons were especially God-like because in the operating theatre they presided over modern-day miracles.
But Saul, by contrast, didn’t really buy any man’s superiority over his own human capabilities. He had achieved staggering wealth. He had provided a workforce of thousands in a dozen different countries with their livelihoods. He had given millions away. To him a doctor was only a specialist in the same mechanical way a software designer or an actuary was. They had a set of professional credentials and a given area of expertise. There was nothing really awe-inspiring about them. They could as easily be right as wrong.
So before the disease really gripped, he had the gym built; as though exercise could counter a lifetime’s contempt for routine physical exercise and heavy indulgence in bad habits. Of course, it hadn’t worked.
But it was good news for Freemantle, who took his responsibilities to his employer very seriously, who liked to keep in shape and who believed very strongly in checks and balances. There wasn’t a man born who didn’t have a few bad habits. But you could counter the damage they were likely to cause unchecked by compensating for them with some good ones.
The gym was one of his good habits. It kept his cholesterol and blood pressure down and helped with his resting pulse. It made him physically strong and sharp and it countered the natural aggression that could sometimes cause him to act regrettably when someone chose to provoke him. He liked how his gym work made him look. He had been given a pretty good start genetically, but had built on that foundation over the years.
The comms room was necessary to the smooth running of Abercrombie Industries. Freemantle didn’t know how Saul managed to juggle so many balls with the skill and enterprise he did. Even sick, he kept everything in the air. It would have a second use now, of course, that the planting was to begin. They would get accurate meteorological information. Weather prediction was pretty crucial in so vast a challenge as planting a mature forest of the size they intended.
Some of the info the comms room provided was sort of freaky. Saul had taught him how to use the monitoring equipment and made it his task to take regular readings. He didn’t really understand the motive for this. Nor did he understand the anomalies thrown up. Why were some parts of the estate persistently cold? Pockets of ground fog could reduce the temperature of low-lying spots, particularly at night. But while that wouldn’t be exactly random, it would be more arbitrary than the puzzling consistency of the readings he got.
The fog bank, though, was a new one on him altogether. It had been like nothing he’d seen before in the weeks that they’d been here. And he hadn’t seen the thorn bush move with quite the same barbed restlessness as it had when he had shown it to the tree guy. It had shifted in the past. It hadn’t seethed. In a funny way, it seemed to him as though the place was preparing for something. It was a ludicrous thought, held up to the light. But it was also kind of unnerving.
The armoury was the smallest of the rooms in the basement of the house. It was little bigger than a walk-in cupboard. But it was well-stocked with rifles and shotguns and half-a-dozen automatic pistols of a very recent vintage.
Some of this ordnance was what a seasoned countryman might expect. Most isolated farms had a shotgun and rifle to hand. They were necessary tools and with the increase over recent years in violent theft from remote properties, it was only really common sense.
There was some heavy calibre stuff too though, that might have raised a rural eyebrow, lubed and gleaming on the armoury’s racks. Freemantle considered this equally necessary. Saul was one of the wealthiest men in the Britain. That made him a potential target for kidnap. Kidnap gangs arrived heavily armed and in numbers and were not easily deterred from plans painstakingly put together. Freemantle was confident he could deter them if it came to it. He was vigilant and willing and with the hardware and ammo in the armoury room, his boss had provided him with the means.
People made assumptions based on appearance. He’d seen the assumptions the tree guy had made on meeting him and encouraged them with that bit of fiction about his ‘manoeuvres’ in Lincolnshire back in the day.
Lincolnshire hadn’t been drill. It had been running. He had been a fugitive. He really had experienced that ghostly encounter taking refuge for the night in a Nissen hut on the abandoned airfield. He knew about weapons too. He had handled them often and used them to lethal effect. But his experience in their use had not been acquired in quite the way Tom Curtis would be likely now to assume.
He showered after his workout and changed. He sauntered into the comms room, switched on a screen, tapped coordinates into a keyboard and saw that the fog bank had all but lifted. He looked at his watch. It was 10 a.m. With no pressing duties till lunchtime, he decided he would spend a couple of hours oiling and cleaning the guns.
Francesca spent the early part of the morning in her studio. It was a much more productive period than her flustered visit of the previous evening. She cleaned oil paint off her fingers with turpentine at the end of it, thinking that two more sessions might see the picture she was working on completed. It was an inexact science. They were done only when they announced to you that they were done. But this one almost was now and she was pleased with it.
She joined her father for coffee on the terrace just after 10 a.m. and he had only just poured for her when they heard the buzz of Curtis returning from wherever he’d been aboard the quad bike.
‘Went to check on his handiwork,’ her father said.
‘Into that fog bank?’
‘Yeah, if the grey stuff was still with us this morning.’
‘Oh, I think it probably was.’
‘An experience,’ he said.
‘What you’d call a bad trip, Dad?’
He smiled at that. She knew that he liked it when she teased him but thought the joke a bit callous of her. She didn’t think there was anything really dangerous out there to threaten Tom Curtis. On the other hand, she would not have ventured into the fog herself. Not to the cliff top, by the cairn, where the yew tree was now planted. Certainly not alone.
He was getting closer to them. She couldn’t make out his features clearly yet, but he looked pale. ‘What if he’s just experienced something that’s really freaked him out? He did yesterday. He seems to be quite sensitive to atmosphere, for a guy who deals in practicalities.’
Her father shrugged. She couldn’t see his eyes. They were hidden by his sunglasses. She suspected a bad night. He said, ‘Curtis won’t just quit and take off. Not the type. Anyway, Jo told me two hours ago that he wasn’t in his room, after she knocked on his door with a breakfast tray. Gave me time to arrange something.’
‘A little surprise for him?’
‘An incentive for him to stay.’
He’d reached them. He got off the bike, took off his helmet and finger-combed his hair. Abercrombie gestured for him to join them. He unzipped his jacket, took it off and hung it across the back of his chair. Francesca poured him coffee. He smiled a thank you and raised the cup to his lips. She noticed a slight tremor in his hand. It could have been caused by the vibration of the bike, but she didn’t think it was.
‘How’s our yew?’
‘Lonely.’
‘But healthy? Flourishing?’
Curtis paused before replying. He said, ‘It looks like it belongs there. It looks at home.’
‘No downside, Tree Man?’
‘Not with the yew. I think you might have a wildlife issue, though.’
‘No way,’ Abercrombie said.
‘Something large and feral.’
‘A beastie? We’re a long way from Bodmin Moor, brother.’
‘I’d take the Beast of Bodmin over whatever it was I heard in the fog this morning.’
When her father next spoke it was in his real voice, the one underneath the hippie vernacular, the one Francesca remembered having heard maybe half-a-dozen times in her adult life. The last time, it had been to break to her the news of her mother’s death. And that had been five years ago.
‘I’m dying, Tom. This project is important to me. It will very likely be the last thing I ever do.’ He reached for his daughter’s hand. ‘Don’t run out on us.’
‘I’m going to London,’ Curtis said. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow evening. I’m not running out on anyone, but when I get back, I’d like answers to some of the questions this place is posing.’
‘You’ll have them,’ Abercrombie said, ‘if I know them. Word of honour, you will.’
Curtis nodded and rose to go. To his retreating back, Abercrombie said, ‘There’s a little something in your room, Tree Man, in a bag on the bed. Let’s call it a down payment.’
S
he said, ‘I’m surprised you haven’t asked to see her yet. It’s almost twenty minutes since you arrived.’
‘She isn’t here.’
‘Your self-control is quite something. Don’t you want to see your daughter?’
‘She isn’t here, Sarah. You wouldn’t have agreed to see me if she was.’
‘I probably would have, just not here. I would have insisted on neutral ground.’
‘What do you think of my proposal?’
She looked at the open bag on the table between them, at the money it contained. It was so quiet in the sitting room of the home they used to share that Curtis could hear rain beat on the window almost one heavy drop at a time.
‘Where do you think she is?’
He stood and went over to the window. What used to be his family were housed in a gated development. The view outside was sterile, rows of parked cars in identical drives, white paintwork and trim lawns and sycamore saplings in a tame row, everything wet. He said, ‘It’s half-term. I expect she’s enjoying a sleepover somewhere with a friend. Not here, not a neighbour. You’ll have put her a safe distance away.’