The Memory of Trees Read Online Free PDF Page A

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