CHAPTER III

Most of the hedging alongside the road that was scheduled for widening had also been removed in the past, although the fencing erected in their stead had been wooden, so it was slightly less offensive than the wire netting, even though it had long been in dire need of a repair that it was now doomed never to receive. The dearth of intrusive edges made things easier for pedestrians as well as vehicles, though, and it was obvious as they made the left turn that the three of them would have no difficulty keeping out of the way of any vehicles that went past them while they walked along the “glorified cart track.” Even though the gate that had once sealed the exit to the A303 had been removed, for the convenience of the new residents of the modern hamlet recently built on the site of Tenebrion Farm, the track still bore a notice saying PRIVATE ROAD: NO RIGHT OF WAY.

It hadn’t occurred to Hazard until he saw it that Pearlman’s Last-Ditchers would be trespassing, thus requiring him to break the law even to look at the site, but he had come too far to turn around. Cursing himself silently for allowing himself to be sucked in, he began to walk up the narrow lane ahead of his two companions.

The fields beyond the faces to either side hadn’t been ploughed or planted for years, but hadn’t yet turned back to scrub; the exhausted soil that had probably needed tons of fertilizer to continue producing crops while the agricultural contest was still in full flow was apparently unable to support a rapid return to wilderness, and the bushes and saplings that were trying to grow in them seemed half-hearted, even when they weren’t conspicuously sickly. Spring had been warm, but not particularly wet, as spring usually was nowadays, and the grasses that should have been running riot in the fallow fields seemed far from lush. Hazard could see easily enough why the farm had become economically inviable in terms of cereal production, even with the elaborate support of artificial fertilizers.

For the first few hundred yards, during which the track curved gently to the left, there was little or no change in the surroundings. Then Hazard came to the border of Tenebrion Wood—although Pearlman’s earlier description of it as “a little patch of woodland” seemed to summarize its limited size and nondescript quality more accurately than the somewhat pretentious name. It didn’t seem haunted at present—although it was broad daylight, and any surviving night-spirits couldn’t really be expected to suggest their presence for several hours yet.

The fences along the track were replaced by the remnants of old hedges as soon the edge of the wood was reached, but the planted hawthorns were soon replaced by a chaotic mess of thin-boled trees and thick-leaved undergrowth, which crowded together so closely as to make penetration difficult. The foliage loomed over the pathway with dismal effect, although the arching branches hadn’t quite contrived to form a tunnel roof. Hazard observed, wryly, that this really was natural woodland, crammed with sickly and diseased specimens, having nothing of the airy spaciousness of a well-managed and carefully coppiced wood.

It certainly seemed plausible, at first glance, that the site of Tenebrion Wood had never been brought under cultivation, and that it had been let alone, superstitiously, since Roman times, let alone the era of the Norman takeover and the Domesday Book—although, as he’d pointed out to his former student, that was a far cry from being “untouched” in any absolute sense. If Steve Pearlman could scoop up Tenebrio beetles by the dozen, Hazard was prepared to bet his last sixpence that other historically-recent invaders would be equally at home here: gray squirrels, brown rats and black-and-white magpies, as well as hundreds of invertebrate species.

That sort of invasion was not only continuing but accelerating; supermarket supply chains, cross-channel trains and global warming were now joining forces to import alien species into southeast England on a massive scale. Whatever Pearlman’s Last-Ditch Brigade was striving to defend, it wasn’t the native ecosystems of Ancient Britain; those were currently in the process of being shot to hell for the fourth or fifth time since the Celts had allegedly imported agriculture to this not-very-green and not-very-pleasant land during the last-little-ice-age-but-one. Except of course, that according to Margaret Dunstable’s definitive analysis, “Celts” were just one more scholarly fantasy, invented by armchair anthropologists.

“It doesn’t look like much,” observed Helen Hearne, evidently disappointed by the sight of the goblin wood.

“That’s because it isn’t,” Hazard said. “Steve certainly can’t mount a defense on the ground of Outstanding Natural Beauty.” In a spirit of professional scrupulousness, however, he added: “But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it can’t be scientifically interesting.”

It wasn’t difficult for the three of them to find the gap in the thicket through which access to the wood was possible; numerous feet had trod that way recently. Nor was it difficult, by following the trail, to locate the operative base that Steve Pearlman and his half-dozen friends had set up during the last couple of days, although they were evidently trying to be sufficiently discreet not to reveal the extent and nature of their operation to passing vehicles until they had established a defendable vantage-point.

The fringes of the wood weren’t so dense that there was nowhere within spitting distance of the road where sufficient undergrowth could be cleared to pitch a tent, but tents were not the key to a serious occupation. The standard tactics of anti-bulldozer brigades involved perches in treetops and, if possible, underground refuges. The traditional chains and padlocks still had their uses, but endurance required a measure of inaccessibility.

As he approached the Last-Ditchers’ base of operation, Hazard could see clearly enough that the canopy squad were having some difficulty getting their arboreal platforms and rope bridges into position, and so far as he could see, the sappers—or, more precisely, the lone digger—had barely started sinking a single shaft. By the time he and his companions came into the base-camp the sentry had whistled a warning, and a mud-caked head had bobbed up out of the shaft in question.

“Oh hi, John!” said the muddy head. “Steve said you were expected.” He raised his voice to shout, “OK, boys, he’s on our side!” before lowering it again to say, “You remember me, don’t you?”

Hazard would never have recognized the face of the boy beneath the mask of mud, but the voice would have been a giveaway even if Pearlman hadn’t mentioned his nickname the day before. “Um…Adrian,” he said. Hazard assumed that it was because his name was Adrian rather than because he was a digger that his compatriots had initially called the boy Moley, but the nickname had presumably helped shape his destiny within the ragamuffin army. Hazard felt that it might have seemed an intimacy too far for him to use the pseudonym, even though Moley had addressed him by his first name.

“Where’s Steve?” he asked.

Moley pulled himself out of the hole, revealing a body that was every bit as filthy as his head. “He’s showing the skirt round the clearing. He’ll have heard the signal—won’t be long.”

Hazard knew that the digger’s use of the word “skirt” wasn’t simply a symptom of thoughtless sexism. In road-protest parlance, “skirt” referred specifically to a female outsider—female ecowarriors never wore skirts. Hazard looked around at his own companions, neither of whom was wearing a skirt, although they too would be assigned to the category, unless Helen Hearne eventually decided to make the commitment for which Steve Pearlman was still optimistically fishing.

“Can you find a pair of wellingtons for Dr. Dunstable?” he asked the muddy boy. In fact, the ground on which they were actually treading wasn’t particularly damp thus far, but Hazard could see that the undergrowth in the heart of the wood was so dense and thorny that leg-armor would definitely be required.

“Sure,” said Moley. “There should be some in the dump.”

“Dump” was short for “equipment dump” rather than “rubbish dump.” Ecowarriors were very particular about litter disposal.

The boy found a pair of rubber boots and offered them to the older woman. “A bit big, I’m afraid,” he said, “but you won’t be able to move fast in there anyway, even with the path cut.”

“I take it that the developer doesn’t know you’re here yet,” Hazard observed.

“I’m certain that he does,” Moley corrected him. “He’s been crashing on his glorified building-site for as long as we’ve been here. He and the other temporary residents caught on as soon as we arrived, and there’s been suspiciously heavy traffic on the path they want to widen, pedestrian as well as vehicular. The phones have doubtless been buzzing while they plan their next move. We’re not expecting the opening salvo of blustery threats any time soon, though. Our intelligence says that the contractors aren’t scheduled to start work in the road until mid-week—that gives them as well as us plenty of time to make strategic preparations. Say, John, you’re a scientist—you know about soil structure. I’m having a hell of a job digging this tunnel. There was never any hope in the clearing—the stuff there’s like black treacle—but Steve wanted me to dig a way down anyway. I thought it would be better here, but the texture is still weird. If I ever get down far enough to start digging laterally, I’ll probably need more wood to shore it up than the lads up top will use to build platforms. Silly, isn’t it, having to import wood to a wood? I’d appreciate it if you could take a look and give us an expert opinion.”

“I’m a beetle man,” Hazard said, unable to think of anything more foolhardy than taking a look at the walls of a hole that had communicated so much filth to the young man’s clothing and face. “I sift leaf-litter when I have to, but everything below the humus is out of my jurisdiction. Sorry.”

“Well, there’s plenty of dead leaves,” Moley replied, unresentfully. “What you’d expect in a wood, I guess. Never seen so many creepy-crawlies are there were in the clearing when it began to get dark, after I’d done the test-drill—plenty to exercise you there, I dare say. I figured out that all woods aren’t the same when we were at Egypt Mill, but this baby is seriously yucky.”

“That’s how things go when they’re left to themselves,” Hazard said, patronizingly. “If the woodcutters don’t keep coming in to clear out the old growth and thin out the saplings, and the peasants don’t come to collect the dead wood to fuel their hearths, hardly any of the acorns ever grow into mighty oaks. Mother Nature’s a real slut when it comes to housekeeping. As for the creepy-crawlies, every frostless winter we have sets off a new population explosion, in spite of the fin-de-siècle explosion in pesticide use—it’s just one damn plague after another. Tenebrio came to Europe to raid our granaries to begin with, but the genus is as versatile as any other vermin. Rats, people, even cockroaches—you name it and Tenebrio will give it a run for its money.”

Steve Pearlman had now become visible between the densely packed and crooked tree trunks, so Moley must have figured that he had done his bit for the cause of courtesy. With a casual wave of a black hand he disappeared back into his hole.

The woman with Steve was, indeed, wearing a skirt, but she’d had the sense to bring wellingtons. Her hair was cut short, but not as severely as the general run of Steve’s female friends, or even as severely as Margaret Dunstable’s. She was older than Helen Hearne—more Hazard’s age than Steve’s.

“Hi, Doc,” said Steve. “Glad you could make it.” To his companion he added: “This is the entomologist I mentioned—taught me at uni, or tried: John Hazard. Also Margaret Dunstable, historian, and Helen Hearne, biochemist. Dr. Hazard, Dr. Dunstable, Helen, this is Claire Croly.”

Claire Croly was clean enough for Hazard not to mind taking the hand she extended. His slight hesitation was caused by the thought that she might be a reporter. “What pretext did he use to drag you out here?” was the politest way he could think of to ask.

“He says the place gets lively after dark,” the woman said, obliquely, as she moved on to greet his companions. “Margaret Dunstable, did Steve say?” she said, to the older woman. “The Margaret Dunstable?”

“Probably,” the historian admitted. “It depends on the context in which you mean the the.”

“The bête noire of the Folklore Society? The Margaret Dunstable who makes the Pendragonists and the Templars foam at the mouth for insisting on referring to them as lifestyle fantasists, and the bases of all their various pretentions as scholarly fantasies?”

“Yes,” said the historian, with a sigh that seemed slightly contrived, perhaps because she was actually glad to meet two strangers familiar with her work in little more than an hour. “I’m that one.”

“Things probably will get lively soon enough,” Hazard observed, picking up on Claire Croly’s earlier remark because he was curious to know why she’s avoided his question. “But it’s not the kind of party you wear your best clothes to—and the gatecrashers sometimes get ugly.”

“We’re not expecting the opposition to turn up mob-handed yet,” Steve Pearlman said, sharply. “Not until Monday, at the earliest—and we won’t be doing any partying. We’re direly undermanned and already behind schedule. Claire’s here for the same reason you are: to look over the site.”

“You’re a biologist?” Hazard said, looking quizzically into the woman’s clear brown eyes.

“Not exactly,” she said, wryly. “I’m on the staff of the Fortean Times.”

Hazard felt as if his face had been slapped. The worst suspicion he’d so far entertained was that she might be from the local rag; the truth seemed considerably worse. He rounded angrily on Steve Pearlman, who was wearing the same infuriating grin that had possessed his face when he’d initially closed the trap on his old tutor. “Damn, it, Steve!” he said. “I can’t believe you’d set me up for this! Jesus, it’s bad enough being fucked over by the Sun. Plastering my name all over the Fortean Times will just about kill my career.”

“I told you yesterday would be better,” Pearlman replied, unrepentantly. “You insisted on double-booking yourself.”

“I can assure you that I’ve no intention of plastering your name anywhere, Dr. Hazard,” Claire Croly was quick to add. “Or yours, Dr. Dunstable, without your permission. Your presence here is of no relevance to me. Even if something were to happen—and I see no reason, as yet, to think that it will—I’m perfectly prepared to leave your name out of any report I might make, if that’s your wish.”

Hazard gulped air as he fought to control an outburst of temper that he knew perfectly well to be unreasonable. He was conscious of over-reacting, and had surprised himself by the violence of his response. My nerves are more highly-strung than I thought, he said to himself, sternly. Need to keep a tight rein. He didn’t want to make a worse fool of himself by blustering. His gaze flickered back and forth between Pearlman and the woman. “So I’m an afterthought, am I?” he said, trying his best to synthesize levity, as if it were a joke. “I’ll be your last hope, if the Fortean Society can’t give you any ammunition to fight with.”

“If you’d come when I asked,” Pearlman pointed out again, “you’d have been in and out before Claire arrived—or Dr. Dunstable, for that matter. It was short notice, I admit, but still—for you, I took the trouble to collect the beetles. All I offered Claire was a cupful of unease—and the name of the wood, of course. You do realize, don’t you, that it wasn’t named after the beetles?”

“Of course I do,” Hazard said, knowing that it wouldn’t sound convincing in spite of the fact that it was the simple truth. He was honest enough not to claim that he’d worked it out for himself. “Dr. Dunstable has told me that it referred originally to some kind of elemental spirit.”

“Elemental spirits are a scholarly fantasy,” Margaret Dunstable put in, unhelpfully. “An invention of the seventeenth century.”

“Unlike goblins, which are an unscholarly fantasy,” Hazard observed. “But a sprite by any other name….”

Pearlman, still intellectually fully-charged after his visit to the library, was quick to add: “It’s not just that Tenebrion with an n is Old French for goblin; there’s an obsolete English word tenebrio, which the dictionary defines as a kind of night-spirit.” He had obviously consulted the same reference book as Margaret Dunstable.

“Etymology aside, I still don’t appreciate your bringing me out to hunt for ghosts and fairies with a reporter from the Fortean Times,” Hazard informed him, coldly. “And I can’t imagine that Dr. Dunstable likes it either.”

He looked at the older woman for support, but she simply shrugged her shoulders.

“Actually,” said Pearlman, patiently, “I brought you out here to look for insects, and Dr. Dunstable to see a location mentioned in the Domesday Book. I brought Claire to hunt for ghosts and fairies. It’s called not putting all your eggs in one basket. We are the Last-Ditch Brigade, remember? Even the Friends aren’t wholly behind us on this one. Do you know how the circulation of the Fortean Times compares with that of The British Journal of Entomology—or New Scientist, come to that?”

Hazard did know; he had always thought it a sad comment on the times in which he was living. “I shouldn’t have come,” he said, wearily.

“Yeah,” said Steve Pearlman, unsympathetically, “well, you thought that yesterday, and you came anyway. Now you’re here, instead of feeling injured for no particular reason, you might as well take a look around, mightn’t you? Then you can go back to your ivory tower and your lonely graveyard, protect your reputation as a scrupulous bore, and pray that urban blight won’t come marching over your own personal horizon for a few years yet.” Now that he had Hazard on site, if not precisely where he wanted him, his ever-fragile diplomacy had gone by the board somewhat.

Hazard clenched his jaw, but decided against striking back. He knew that the young man had a point. He had to be careful not to overreact again, lest it become obvious just how fragile he was at present. On the other hand, he did have to hope that this reporter’s promise was worth more than the average. He really could do without a mention in the Fortean Times—a mention that one or other of his students was, alas, bound to spot.

“OK,” he said, eventually. “Show us what you’ve got. Give us the tour of this supposedly-mysterious clearing.”

Most of what Pearlman had, it transpired, was little more than Hazard had already guessed from his first sight of the little wood. The ecowarrior had elected to defend a little corner of Nature that had already been more than half-choked by Nature’s own fecundity. The wood had been unhealthy for centuries. Far from bringing it back from the brink, the recent string of mild winters and benign springs had given a tremendous boost to its parasites. More than three in every five of the standing trees were dying, and the leaf-litter that had accumulated with undue rapidity had begun to rot down with almost tropical alacrity.

Hazard pulled some decaying bark off a dead tree to examine the insects scurrying around underneath. Pearlman had called the wood “beetle heaven” but that had just been a come-on. There were more ants and woodlice in the rotten wood than beetles. Moley had been spot on, however, when he’d described the place as “seriously yucky’. All kinds of tiny organisms were having a high old time in the vicinity, including the mealworms that were the larvae of darkling beetles, but the only message implicit in their unusual activity was that this thousand-year-old stand of trees was doomed, regardless of whether or not bulldozers were allowed to pulverize it in the interests of transforming a farmer’s access-track into two lanes of neatly-laid tarmac and a pedestrian pavement.

Hazard did, however, play his part conscientiously. He let Steve Pearlman lead the little caravan of which he was a part through an extremely narrow recently-cleared path to the center of the patch of woodland, where there was indeed a circular clearing some twenty yards in diameter, in which the ground was very flat, covered with a carpet of moss and grass but devoid of saplings, or even serious brambles. And in the middle of the ring, like the bull’s-eye of an archery target, there was a hole, with piles of excavated dirt arranged around it in a moderately near semicircle: Moley’s “test-drill.” The space between the end of the improvised trail and the hole was covered with footprints, which had made a kind of sunken pathway, but most of the surface showed no such indentations.

Hazard stepped on to the surface beside the marked pathway in order to head for the hole in the middle, but paused as his boot sank into the softer ground. For a moment, he though it might keep going, but it only went in to a depth of a few millimeters. He moved back on to the strip that was already compressed and set forth, followed by Margaret Dunstable. The others waited on the edge, watching them.

Hazard could not see any unusual beetle activity on the heaps of humus removed from the hole by Moley, nor did the hole itself—which was about three feet deep and not much wider, seem interesting or inviting. He bent down gingerly and took a clasp-knife out of his trouser-pocket, with which he began to stir the black heap. It was, as Steve Pearlman had suggested, mostly ancient leaf-litter, decayed into a slightly glutinous compost. There were insects within it, adults as well as much more numerous larvae and pupae, but not in unusual numbers, and he couldn’t see any unusual species; there were earthworms too, inevitably, and numerous woodlice.

Meanwhile, Margaret Dunstable made her way carefully around the semicircle. She was carrying an archaeologist’s trowel, which she must have been carrying in the pocket of her jacket, and she was stirring the dirt with the same care as Hazard. He knew, however, that she wasn’t looking for insects.

“Steve thinks that there might have been some kind of structure, doesn’t he?” he inferred. “He thinks the reason the trees haven’t colonized the space might have something to do with…I don’t know, foundations of some sort?”

“There’s more hope than thought in it,” the historian replied, “but yet—that’s why he went to the archeologists first. But if the clearing really has been sealed off for hundreds, or even thousands, of years by the surrounding thicket, it’s highly unlikely that the remains if any kind of wooden structure would have prevented the vegetation from taking over, and he could see for himself that there’s no trace of stone. He didn’t say anything, but I think he might have had vague ideas in his mind about druid altars or something similar—he doesn’t know the first thing, even about the myth, of course, let alone the fact that I’m notorious for dismissing all the so-called evidence as so much fantasy. Not that it matters—I can’t see any evidence here of anything but vegetable decay. Can you?”

“No,” said Hazard. “Which is, in fact, slightly weird. Obviously the ground in the clearing is anomalous in some way, but nothing immediately springs to mind to account for the anomaly.”

Helen Hearne came to join them then. She was carrying two of the stoppered tubes of the kind that Pearlman had used to bring Hazard the beetles.

“Steve wants me to take some soil samples,” she explained. “I can’t imagine what he expects me to find, or even to look for, but I might as well, as I’m here. I can run it through a few elementary tests, and I might even get permission to try a dab or two in the mass spec, although the stuff is probably way too complex to produce anything but confusion.”

Hazard sighed. “There’s nothing interesting here,” he said. “I’d better take a look around the outskirts of the wood, though, so that Steve can’t accuse me of not having taken the matter seriously.”

Pearlman was waiting to escort him back along trail through the thicket. Once they were back in the part of the wood where a person could at least move around, he showed him two other shallow muddy hollows six or seven feet in diameter.

“There’s nothing there now,” Pearlman said, but they do come to life after dark—or they did last night and the night before, at any rate, when the moths are flying.”

“Are there unusual moths, or unusual quantities?” Hazard asked, suspecting that Pearlman was trying to talk him into spending the night in the wood, or at least waiting until after nightfall before making his way back home—and, he supposed, dropping off Margaret Dunstable and Helen Hearne on the way.

“I’m not really much of a judge of the usual,” Pearlman admitted. “But there are a lot. Is it worth collecting some, do you think, in case there are unusual specimens among them? I caught a few, but no hawk months…not that they did the trick last time.”

“You do know the wood’s dying, don’t you?” Hazard said.

“I know that a lot of the trees are sickly,” The wood’s defender said, a trifle reluctantly, “but it’s just a bit overcrowded—except in the clearing, of course. Do you know why the trees don’t grow there?”

“I can’t say for sure, but there are several possibilities. I suppose you asked Helen to collect soil samples in the hope of discovering some anomaly there, but you do realize that she’s unlikely to find anything unless you can tell her exactly what to look for?”

“I was hoping that you might be able to do that. You’re the biologist.”

“So are you, if your degree certificate can be believed—an ecologist, even. Don’t you have a hypothesis to account for the clearing?”

“No, I don’t,” Steve Pearlman admitted, but didn’t add a comment suggesting that his degree really wasn’t worth much. He hadn’t thrown diplomacy completely to the winds.

“The developer’s surveyor probably took samples too,” Hazard observed, “and even if he didn’t bother, Nordley’s a far better ecologist than either or us. He could probably identify the reason for the clearing as soon as he stepped into it.”

“Yes, but the Evil Developer’s not going to let us or anyone else see his report, are they—certainly not if it contains any information we might be able use against them. These hollows are odd, though, aren’t they?” Pearlman’s expression showed a certain hopeful interest as Hazard tested the second concavity with his fingertips and then dug the blade of his knife into it.

“I think I can guess what’s happened here,” Hazard said, hesitantly, “and, on a larger scale, in the clearing. The wood might have been untouched by human hand for centuries but that doesn’t mean to say that there haven’t been changes. Your so-called hole isn’t ancient at all, and the cause of the alteration might be hundreds of yards away, if not miles. Let me take a look at the outer rim of the wood, and the surrounding fields. I don’t think the crucial evidence will be visible on the surface, but it’s worth a look around before I venture a hypothesis. Given that it’s not two hours since I was telling Margaret Dunstable that biology is full of unsuspected scholarly fantasies, I don’t want to start fantasizing myself without checking as many facts as I can.”

“But you don’t think it’s anything we can use?” Pearlman said, with a sigh.

“Steve, with the best will in the world, I don’t think there’s anything at all here you can use. This isn’t a battle you can win, and I really don’t think it’s worth fighting.

“It’s always worth fighting,” the ecowarrior said, stubbornly. “There’s a war on, and it has to be fought, silently if not with publicity. They’re not going to get us out of here without a struggle. If all we can do is slow the tide, even just a little bit, that’s what we have to do.”

“It’s pointless,” Hazard judged, cursing the sticky mud that was now clinging to his fingertips. He plucked a few fresh leaves from a nearby tree that was still alive, hanging on as stubbornly as the Last Ditch Brigade. The leaves seemed dry and peculiarly autumnal, considering that the saps of spring ought to have been rising lustily within the xylem. If he was correct in his speculation regarding the reason for the hollows, though….

Hazard moved on and Pearlman followed. A host of slender branches drew their tips across Hazard’s face, but they didn’t get tangled in his hair and they didn’t leave scratches. They too seemed oddly limp and effete. It was almost as if the wood knew that it was doomed, and had become listless in the face of adversity.

“Don’t worry about the stroking,” Pearlman said, in a tone that emphasized just a little too much the fact that he was joking. “The spirit of the wood’s just trying to get acquainted. Not many thorns at face height. It’ll like you, with you being a biologist and all. It doesn’t seem to like me much, even though I’ve come to help it out. The tips are always catching in my hair.”

“You should get it cut occasionally,” Hazard suggested. “Anyhow, if trees were capable of forming relationships at all, I expect these would want to keep a polite distance until they’d been properly introduced. They’re English, after all. They can’t take kindly to having shanties connected by ropy ratlines erected in their canopy.”

Pearlman laughed at that, politely—but then he got called away by one of his fellow warriors.

Hazard continued his investigations solo, shoving his way through the seemingly amorous undergrowth with as much delicacy as he could to the edge of the wood and then turning to make his way around it, pausing now and again in order to inspect all kind of chewed and pockmarked leaves.

If nothing else, pottering around the outskirts in Tenebrion Wood gave his spotting skills a thorough and much needed workout. There were Silvanidae as well as Tenebrionidae left over from the days when cereals had been grown on the adjacent fields, numerous Rhizophagidae and, perhaps most interestingly, a couple of Acanthoceridae that were a long way from their normal subtropical habitat. There was a slim possibility that they might be the first ones sighted north of Southampton, but who would care?

He took the trouble to collect a few of the more interesting specimens, but even after a further hour of assiduous study he couldn’t believe that he’d found anything that might be of the slightest relevance to Pearlman’s frail hope of mustering public sympathy behind the wood. The simple truth was that Tenebrion Wood wasn’t a Site of Special Scientific Interest. The old cemetery behind Hazard’s house was much more interesting, in an objective sense, although it wasn’t quite as densely populated with beetle species.

When Hazard eventually found himself, a trifle unexpectedly, on the edge of the wood facing the cluster of almost-complete houses that had replaced the barns of Tenebrion Farm, not far from the road scheduled for widening, he figured that it was time to give up and go home. He was about to make his way across the field to the road when everything changed again. Having caught sight of something tiny and black-and-yellow out of the corner of his eye, he took three paces towards it, and knelt down. He hadn’t even stabilized his crouching position when a groan of despair escaped his lips.

For a moment, Hazard wondered whether Pearlman might have set him up, and whether he’d been brought in merely to find something that the ex-ecology student had already found. But that didn’t make sense. If Pearlman really had seen and identified what Hazard had just found, he’d have known full well that his petty crusade was futile, and that the technologically-assisted execution of the wood was a mere formality waiting to be recognized.

On the other hand, Hazard thought, even if Pearlman hadn’t set him up, he had exposed him to the attention of a reporter from the Fortean Times, and made him a hostile witness to the front end of a ghost- and fairy-hunt. He still had some cause for resentment.

He was still crouching over his discovery, letting his thoughts wander, when an unfamiliar voice said: “Dr. Hazard, I presume? I see that you’ve found the last nail in the goblin wood’s coffin.”

Hazard turned round as he straightened up, and looked the speaker up and down. He must have come from the direction of the houses, and cut across from the cart-track on seeing him in the field. But how on earth does he know my name? Hazard thought.

So far as he knew, Hazard had never seen the man before. He was tall, maybe six feet, with dark hair showing traces of gray. He was reasonably well-dressed—not wearing a suit, but far less casually clad than Hazard—and he was wearing ordinary shoes, not wellingtons.

Hazard remembered, belatedly, that he was trespassing—and the other, whoever he was, know his name. And if the implication of what he’d said could be trusted, he also knew what Hazard had just discovered.

“I’m sorry,” Hazard said, tentatively. “Do I know you?”

“We’ve never met,” said the other. “I’m Dennis Nordley. It’s my work that Mr. Pearlman has brought you here to double-check. I think you’ll find, as I did, that there’s no reasonable case for conservation of the wood on the grounds of special scientific interest—quite the reverse, in fact.”

“You’ve notified the ministry?” Hazard says.

“Of course—as I’m obliged by law to do. Do they still have those quaint illustrated notices in police stations? I haven’t been in one for some time, I’m afraid.”

“And you think I have?” Hazard queried.

Nordley smiled. “I didn’t mean to imply any insult,” he said.

“Since we’ve never met,” Hazard countered, “how do you know who I am?”

“Apart from the fact that you were bending down and looking distraught, having just discovered the residue of a Colorado beetle infestation on the last survivors of the imported potato plants with which this field was once unwisely sown? I fear, Dr. Hazard, that your arrival here was noted by a member of the security firm that the landowner has hired to defend his interests in the case of trouble with your friend Mr. Pearlman. The firm has confronted Mr. Pearlman before, at Egypt Mill, and their representative kindly brought along their dossier on his activities to what he insists on referring to as ‘a council of war,’ which is taking place at this moment in one of the houses over there. Among other things, the dossier contains a list of car number plates, all neatly coupled with the owners’ names. You’re on record, I fear, as a friend of the Friends of the Earth…and of their militant wing, to boot. When our meeting was notified of your presence, I immediately volunteered to come to seek you out and talk to you, given that we’re likely to be the sanest men on either side of this stupid conflict.”

“The landowner’s security firm are spying on me?” Hazard said, hardly able to believe it.

“No, they’re spying on Mr. Pearlman—not in any very sophisticated fashion, but with sufficient enthusiasm to draw up a dossier, which they then had to stuff with data of some kind, in order to justify the effort. All rather pointless, in my view—but perhaps fortunate, if you can talk your friend into packing his tents and stealing away, in order to fight the good fight elsewhere, on more favorable terrain.”

“I’ve already told him,” Hazard said. “He won’t listen. I’ll tell him about the Colorado beetle, and make him understand that DEFRA will insist on spraying the wood as well as the field to make sure that the infestation is eradicated, but he’ll just want to fight the sprayers as well as the bulldozers. To him, DEFRA is just one more enemy to be opposed. I can explain the necessity of exterminating the pest, but I really don’t think he’ll take a blind bit of notice.”

“Ah,” said Nordley, seeming sincere in his disappointment. “And I thought I was having problems trying to talk sense into my lot. The representatives of the security firm insist on seeing it as a war too. They actually seem to be looking forward to a conflict. I came down to the meeting to talk sense—although my report should already have done that—not to be consulted about the tactics of battling environmentalist fanatics, but…you and I really don’t belong in the middle of this mess, do we, Dr. Hazard?”

“No, we don’t,” Hazard agreed, but couldn’t resist adding: “And I’m not even getting paid.”

“Well, there is that, of course,” Nordley agreed. “Consultancies look so good on the CV nowadays, don’t they?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Hazard admitted, through slightly gritted teeth.

“You will,” said Nordley, serenely. “This war will run and run, and if both sides are going to continue appealing to the tabloid press for support, making SSIs a crucial element in their armaments of propaganda, we ecologists are going to be in demand.”

“I’m not an ecologist—I’m an entomologist.”

“Just change your label to environmental entomologist. Words can work wonders. Have you worked out what the clearing is?”

“I think so,” Hazard parried. “Have you?”

“I think so too. It used to be a pond, just as the two smaller hollows used to be permanent puddles, but they’ve dried up. Was that your conclusion too?”

Hazard felt that he was being tested, and felt honor bound to show his mettle. “Yes. At a guess, the pond was probably fed by an underground spring that was diverted, probably not that long ago, or depleted because water was drawn off at another point for irrigation purposes. When the water-supply was cut, the three hollows—the big one as well as the two little ones—filled up with leaf litter, creating a kind of mire or mini-peat-bog in the case of the clearing. The cessation of the flow has altered the substratum of the local ecosystem, and it’s probably been struggling with adversity for decades. There might be other complicating factors, but that’s probably the bottom line. That would explain why the local fields, which presumably used to obtain a fraction of their irrigation from the spring, are in such poor condition. The farm was probably moderately healthy fifty years ago, maybe thirty, but it hasn’t been able to recover from the upheaval yet, and there’d probably be a long lag phase, even if it were let alone, before a healthier thicket is able to replace the one that’s rotting as it stands. Is that how you read it?”

Nordley didn’t even nod his head. “I can see that you’ve given it considerable thought,” was all that he would say. “In terms of wildlife, though, you’ll agree that the wood contains nothing worth fighting for?”

“They’re not really fighting for the wood,” Hazard told him. “They’re fighting for a principle.”

Nodley spread his arms wide, in a gesture of helplessness. “There’s nothing science can do about that, is there?” he said.

“Not a lot,” Hazard agreed.

“Can I at least tell my bunch of fanatics that you and I are in perfect agreement about the absence of any rare or endangered species, and that you’ll do your best to make your bunch of fanatics see reason?”

“Fine by me,” said Hazard. “You’d better wish me luck, though, because I don’t think sanity’s going to cut it.”

This time Dennis Nordley did condescend to nod his head in sad agreement. “You’ll notice,” he said, “that I haven’t asked you who the two passengers in your car are, or who the Citroen Saxo belongs to. I’m not a spy, and I have no interest in feeding the ridiculous dossier—but you might care to mention to your friends that other people are probably trying to find out who they are even as we speak, and will probably succeed.”

Hazard couldn’t imagine that any of the three women was going to worry unduly about that, any more than he was himself—and there was a possibility that Claire Croly might actually be quietly pleased to think that mysterious security firms were keeping the agents of the Fortean Times under observation. Nevertheless, he kept his face straight as he said: “I’ll mention it.”

“We’ll probably meet again some time,” Nordley said, stepping forward to offer Hazard his hand.

Hazard scrupulously wiped his hand on his trousers before accepting it. “My pleasure,” he murmured, not entirely sarcastically.

He watched the ecologist head back to Tenebrion Farm, where the “council of war” was doubtless waiting avidly for a report on his improvised embassy. Then he walked back along the road to the point where he had first entered the wood, and went in search of Steve Pearlman and his two passengers.