Enhanced Interrogation
I WOKE IN the hour before dawn, stuck in that strange state where the memory of your dreams is still powerful enough to motivate your actions. Believing that I’d heard someone outside the cowshed doors I’d stumbled to my feet and slid them open. In the moonlight I thought I saw serried ranks of what I now recognized as apple trees filling the pasture out to the old wall, an orchard of silver and shadow. Above their topmost branches was a white point of light, too bright to be a star. A planet—probably Jupiter. There were a couple of bright stars and there, just visible through a gap in the trees, an orange spark that even I could identify—Mars. In that half-dreaming state I was certain that there was a path running through the orchard and beyond the walls a darker and thicker forest full of secret places and hidden people.
Then I blinked and it was just a pasture, an old wall and fields of grain beyond.
Back in the cowshed I dug around in the trunks which Molly had sent from London and extracted the antique brass primus stove. It sloshed heavily when I shook it, so there was plenty of paraffin inside.
As soon as I got the text from Lesley I’d called Inspector Pollock at the Department of Professional Standards, who was my designated point of contact with the team that was investigating Lesley’s criminal misconduct. I informed him that Lesley had made contact and gave him the details. He told me not to make any response until he’d had a chance to make an assessment. I told him to assess away.
The primus came in a handsome wooden carrying case complete with a brassbound saucepan and lid and a reservoir of white spirit for getting it started. I’ve practiced lighting one of these using lux to vaporize the paraffin, but I didn’t want to turn my phone off in case Lesley texted again. It took less than five minutes to fetch water from the bathroom, pump up the pressure, light the white spirit, watch the main burner catch and give a merry flame under the saucepan. Nightingale said that Amundsen had used one of these on his way to the South Pole and that Hilary and Tensing had hiked one up the slopes of Everest.
Further down in the trunk I found a battered biscuit tin containing half a packet of digestives, loose teabags, some teacakes wrapped in rice paper and a bottle of Paterson’s Camp Coffee that was so old that on the label the Sikh was still on his feet proffering a tray to the seated Highland major-general. I decided not to risk it—not least because Camp Coffee is famous for not having any caffeine in it.
After briefing the DPS, I had called Nightingale and told him about Lesley. He seemed rather impressed with it as a tactic.
“Rather neatly pins us, doesn’t it?” he’d said. “I was considering following you up to Herefordshire.”
“What about the comrade major?” I’d asked.
“Oh, I think I’d have brought her too. And Toby,” he’d said. “Might have made quite a jolly outing. But if Lesley knows you’re out of town I can’t get further than a quick rush from the Folly.” And whatever it was that was hidden behind the door in the basement. Whatever it was that Nightingale, I was beginning to suspect, had stayed in his position at the Folly to protect. He wasn’t going to leave that exposed.
So no back-up. Apart from Beverley, who seemed more interested in the River Lugg than in the case. I wanted to ask Nightingale about Ettersberg and what, precisely, was behind the black door in the basement of the Folly—but I bottled out and asked him to check the literature on unicorns and brownies.
He said he’d see what he could find, although he was almost certain that brownies were considered entirely mythical.
Inspector Pollock called back and said that I was to engage Lesley in conversation. “Stretch it out,” he said. “And if you can entice her to talk directly on the phone, so much the better.”
He didn’t have to say that all communication is the policeman’s friend, that even if we can’t trace your call the mere fact that you’re talking tells us something and every cryptic clue, every denial, every weird utterance tells us something. Even if it’s just that you’re in a desperate need to talk to someone.
He didn’t have to say that they were monitoring my phone.
So I texted back: I’m working where R U?
And then I did my paperwork and, after that, to bed to dream of apple trees in the moonlight.
Mercifully I didn’t have to do the briefing in Windrow’s narrow little office, but instead on the first-floor terrace that stuck out in front of the canteen like the flying bridge on a landlocked boat. It may have been an unconscious desire to avoid conferring too much legitimacy on the Falcon assessment, but it was most likely so that Windrow could have a crafty fag. We stood there in the cool morning shade enjoying the chill air as the eastern horizon turned gold under a powder blue sky.
It was Day 6 and things were getting a little bit desperate. Edmondson handed me a newspaper with the headline. POLICE FAILING HANNAH AND NICOLE SAY VILLAGERS.
“If you don’t feed the dogs,” said Windrow, “you’re going to get bitten.”
I checked the by-line, because it always pays to know who not to talk to next time you’ve got something juicy to trade. But I didn’t recognize the name—Sharon Pike.
“Writes columns in a couple of the nationals,” said Edmondson.
“What’s she doing on the front page?” I asked.
“She considers herself a local,” said Windrow.
“She has a cottage in Rushpool,” said Edmondson. “I hear she spends most of her time in London, though.”
I suddenly remembered her from me and Dominic’s fruitless search for village vestigia. She’d been a slight white woman with black hair dressed in skinny jeans and a salmon-colored cardigan. I remembered that she’d asked a lot of questions and I hurriedly reviewed my memory to see how much trouble I might have talked myself into.
Windrow must have seen my expression. “Hasn’t mentioned you yet,” he said.
I didn’t like the sound of that “yet” one bit.
Windrow lit a second cigarette off the first and took a deep drag as if trying to fill every cubic centimeter of his lungs.
“I’m stocking up for when I have to go back inside,” he said.
Edmondson checked his watch and glanced at where the sun was springing up above the distant hills.
“So what’s your assessment?” he asked.
“Before I start, sir, I need to ask you how much actual Falcon information you want to hear.”
Edmondson blinked and Windrow scratched his chin.
“How much do you normally give out?” asked Windrow.
“As much as people are comfortable with,” I said. “Some people don’t like to use the M-word. Some don’t mind that, but want explanations for things we can’t explain.”
“Lad,” said Windrow, “we’re so desperate we’ll take whatever we can get.”
I started with what I’d already told them—that the phones had been fried by magic up on Whiteway Head where the Mortimer Trail crosses onto Bircher Common. That there was something supernatural moving around in the woods to the southeast along the trail which might, if it was the same thing as Nicole’s invisible My Little Pony, be related to her and Hannah’s disappearance.
“If the invisible pony really turned up at the birthday party,” I said, “then we have a clear path from Rushpool, up to Whiteway Head and then west down the Mortimer Trail to where we found yesterday’s dead sheep.”
“We were going to have to go into those woods sooner or later,” Edmondson said to Windrow.
“I do have indications that something weird is localized to that area. And there are historical leads to run down, and I’d like to deploy some specialist help,” I said.
“This would be Beverley Brook, aged twenty, resident of Beverley Avenue, London SW20?” asked Windrow.
Well, of course they’d done an IIP check—they’d probably had Dominic do it.
“Yes, sir.”
“And who is she?” he asked. “Exactly?”
“Best to think of her as a consultant,” I said.
“Good god,” said Edmondson. “Are you saying she’s a . . .” He hesitated as his mandated diversity training caused him to trip over the word voodoo or possibly witchdoctor—I couldn’t tell which. “A traditional spiritualist?” Which impressed the hell out of me, and I was tempted to agree just to reward such a valiant effort. But it’s one thing to withhold information from a senior officer and quite another to feed them false data.
“Not really, sir,” I said. “It’s just that there are some people who’ll talk to her who wouldn’t talk to us.”
“People?” asked Windrow dryly.
“Special people, sir,” I said. “Bees are avoiding the area in question. That’s why we think something is going on there.”
I waited for one of them to ask whether the bees were “special people,” but luckily both of them had more important things on their minds.
“What’s your next step?” asked Windrow.
“I’d like to re-interview both sets of parents,” I said. “See what they know about the invisible Princess Luna. And then I’d like to have a look at Pokehouse Wood and a couple of other places that have come up in the literature.”
“You’re going to have a hard time getting Derek or Andy to interrupt their search,” said Edmondson. “So I’d talk to them as soon as possible—before we restart operations.”
“I’ll ask Cole to facilitate a second interview with the mothers,” said Windrow.
There was the sound of voices from inside the canteen—members of MIU arriving and looking for coffee.
“It’s about time we got in there,” said Edmondson. “Are you ready?”
“One more cigarette,” said Windrow.
Andy had reached the point where he was going to keep going until someone told him he could stop. Even in the bright morning sunshine he looked gray and tired. The next search was staging at Bircher Common, where there was enough room for police and volunteers to park. I took Andy Marstowe aside behind a Peugeot Van with battenberg visibility strips and a West Midlands Police crest, and asked him whether he knew anything about Nicole Lacey’s invisible friend. He just stared at me blankly and said he didn’t know what I was talking about. I’d have preferred it if he’d demanded to know why I was wasting his time. Which just shows, you should never wish for things you don’t really want to get.
“What the fuck is this bullshit?”
Derek Lacey stared at me after I asked him the same thing. He was red faced and erratic and, if I was any judge, about a day away from coming apart at the seams. His voice was angry but his eyes were sad, pleading, wanting to know why I was tormenting him with these stupid questions. I got him calmed down using the patented reasonable police voice while making sure I stayed out of reach. Fortunately, it’s easier to settle people in plain clothes, the uniform has a tendency to set people off, but either way the important thing is to remain calm but firm. This is where doing your two-year probation in the West End comes in really handy.
I explained that we, and it’s always “we” when dealing with aggravated members of the public, were double checking every possible point of contact between Hannah and Nicole and the outside world.
“When kids talk about imaginary friends,” I said, “sometimes they’re talking about a real person. You see, say you don’t want a child’s parents to know you’re talking to them . . . so you tell the child not to tell anyone, tell them that bad things will happen if they do. But kids like to talk, they especially like to talk about their friends. Especially if they’re interesting or naughty. I mean, what is the point of interesting or naughty if you can’t talk about it to someone else?”
A strange look came into Derek’s eyes and I wondered whether maybe I should have avoided the whole “stranger danger” aspect of my little speech. Served me right for making this stuff up as I go along. Then he pushed his hand through his thinning hair and took a deep breath.
“Yes,” he said. “I see now—apologies. What was the question?”
I repeated the question and he shrugged.
“Oh, yeah, I remember Princess Luna,” he said. “I thought that had sort of stopped. Nicky used to demand extra sweets for Princess Luna and then scoff the lot herself. Vicky got very uptight about it—all those childhood obesity articles in the women’s section of the Sundays.”
Apparently, there was one of those mother-daughter power struggles—like those that so enliven the lives of my mum’s relatives—which Derek had made a point of staying out of. Finally, Nicole stopped talking about her imaginary friend, and Derek just assumed it had been a phase.
“Unless it was real,” he said. “And just wandered off one day.”
And how many invisible friends are not imaginary, I asked myself as he walked off to join the search team. What if this stuff is way more common than even the Folly thinks it is? What if it wasn’t just children—what if it was schizophrenics as well?
I carry a notebook with a list of these kinds of questions, and it gets longer every month—especially since Nightingale made answering them conditional on my advancement through the forms and wisdoms.
According to DS Cole, Victoria Lacey and Joanne Marstowe were spending the morning together at the Marstowe house while kind relatives, of which Joanne had almost as many as my mum, were taking the two older boys out for a day in Hereford. When I arrived in the suddenly—and suspiciously—neat and tidy kitchen I found the two mothers seated on either side of the table while DS Cole sat at the end and acted as de facto referee. You could have fried an egg in the space between the two women, and I almost turned on my heel and walked back out again.
“Peter,” said Joanne. “Would you like some tea?” She was already up and bustling before I could answer, so I said I would and deliberately took her seat to break up the confrontation.
Victoria stared at me as I sat down, her face a mask. “Is it true you’ve been asking about Nicky’s silly imaginary friends?”
I gave her the same flannel I’d given her husband and I think she bought it, or at least was willing to convince herself that the police hadn’t suddenly gone completely bonkers.
“Who wants tea?” asked Joanne.
I said yes again, Victoria said no and DS Cole gazed longingly at the kitchen door.
“You know what it’s like with children,” said Victoria. “Once they get an idea in their head they won’t let go—the more you try to stop them the harder they cling on to it. But you can’t just appease them forever—can you?”
Joanne plonked a mug of tea in front of me and I asked her if Hannah had ever claimed to have met Princess Luna.
“Hannah said you could only see her when it was a full moon,” said Joanne as she sat down with her own tea. “I remember because she insisted we have her bloody birthday party on that particular night.”
“I wondered why you’d done that, and it went on so late,” said Victoria.
“The moon wasn’t up until past nine o’clock now, was it?” said Joanne. “I thought they’d got that nonsense from that Hobbit film.”
“I don’t remember a unicorn in The Hobbit,” said Victoria.
“No it was the writing in that,” said Hannah. “On the map.”
Victoria picked a thread off the shoulder of her blouse.
“I don’t think I was paying that much attention,” she said. “It all seemed rather daft.”
“They made us take them to the film twice,” said Joanne. “They were looking forward to the next one.”
Joanne sipped her tea and looked out of the window.
I took the opportunity to surreptitiously check the phases of the moon on my phone—April 26th had been a full moon.
“I remember when they first went missing we thought they might have sneaked out to look at the moon,” said Joanne. “Didn’t we, Vicky?”
That hadn’t been in their initial statements—I saw DS Cole blink.
Victoria nodded her head reluctantly.
“Following the moon,” said Joanne. “Just like last time.”
“I think I will have a cup of tea now,” said Victoria. “If that’s all right with you.”
“Of course,” said Joanne and got up.
“They’d run away before?” asked DS Cole about two seconds before I could wrap my head around the implications.
“No,” said Victoria. “Not Nicky and Hannah, they hadn’t, but they used to talk about it. As a game—following the moon.”
“They had a song,” said Joanne, extracting a teabag and flicking it into the sink. “‘In a minute soon we’ll run away to follow the moon.’”
“It doesn’t really scan, does it,” said Victoria.
I asked some follow-up questions, but Victoria had been trying hard to ignore the whole “imaginary friend situation” as she put it and Joanne had three boys under the age of ten and could rarely hear herself speak, let alone Hannah.
Because the media pack were camped outside the front door, I went out the back and hopped over the garden fence and onto the unofficial—definitely not a right of way—footpath that ran behind the houses. Now that I knew what to look for, I could see that nearly all the late-twentieth-century build in the village had gone up on decommissioned orchards. In some places the old fence line had become the edge of people’s back gardens. One remnant of the original orchards remained behind the Old Vicarage and I saw a dip in its back wall where a pair of eleven-year-old girls could have easily climbed over. This must have been their semi-secret path. No wonder they’d been inseparable since they were old enough to express a preference—it must have been like having their own secret garden.
The pair would have had to split in September—Nicole would be going up the road to Lucton School, fee paying, while Hannah would be commuting into Leominster to attend a state school. Fear of this separation was put forward as one of the narratives that might lead to them running away together. I wondered what being split up might be like—I didn’t have any friends that went to posh schools, unless you counted Nightingale.
The path led me out on a lane by Spring Farm and after a short cut down the back of the graveyard—Rushpool was an old enough village to have two—I came out by the car park of the Swan in the Rushes where Beverley was waiting with the Asbo. All without attracting the attention of the media.
Me and Beverley parked the Asbo at the Riverside Inn, crossed the bridge and found the official Mortimer Trail footpath a hundred meters further on. We followed it to another gate and stile and through another field munched down to a green fuzz by sheep and then over a barbed-wire fence into a lumpy field of long grass. The path was barely visible as a slightly trampled diagonal but luckily we could see the next stile at the far corner. A solitary goat watched us go past—we were probably the most interesting thing that had happened all summer.
I paused mid-field to orientate myself using my phone. We were less than three hundred meters from where we’d found the dead sheep. I looked for it and I could spot where it had lain in the next field.
Pokehouse Wood was not what I expected. For a start, it was missing a lot of trees. It was easy to see where it had been, a rough rectangle of cleared land on a steep slope that ran down to the footpath by the River Lugg. Freshly planted saplings stood in white protective cylinders like ranks of war graves, and between them the scrub and grass were shot through with purple stands of foxglove. I recognized these because I’d googled the plants after seeing Hugh’s notes—famous source of digitalis, which in small doses can save your life and in larger doses kill you.
The missing trees were explained by a sign by the kissing gate which, on behalf of the National Trust, welcomed us to Pokehouse Wood and told us that the area had been cleared and planted with conifers in 2002, but had now been cleared again and planted with native broadleaved trees “to restore the beauty and nature conservation of this important local woodland.” There was a contact number for Croft Castle which I made a note of.
According to the map on my phone, the footpath ran along the river all the way to a historic mill at Mortimer’s Cross. Stairs cut into the slope and reinforced with planking marked where the footpath led up to the ridge. We weren’t supposed to be searching exactly, a full POLSA-directed team was an hour behind us. But I’d wanted to have a look before all those size tens stirred up the ground.
At the top of the steps was another track, this one cut level into the hillside and sloping down toward an intersection with the footpath by the river.
“Logging track,” said Beverley. “That’s why it has to be graded flat. You know, this is a bit weird.”
“Good,” I said. “Weird is what we’re looking for.”
“I don’t think it’s that kind of weird,” she said. “You see, this bit of land we’re standing on belongs to the National Trust but it’s been managed by the Forestry Commission.”
The role of which was to deal with the fact the UK was in danger of losing its forests which were, back then, a strategic national resource on account of the fact you needed it to make stuff. This being before Ikea turned up backed by the limitless expanse of the Swedish forests, fabled home to fascist biker gangs, depressed detectives and werewolves.
“Really?” I asked. “Werewolves?”
“That’s what I heard,” said Beverley.
No wonder the detectives were depressed, I thought. And just about managed to stop myself asking for more information—priorities and all that.
“They would have cut down the ancient woodland and planted western hemlock or Douglas fir, probably,” said Beverley. Because back then you wanted a tree with a nice straight trunk that grew fast and was easy to manage. Then, in the late sixties, it began to occur to people that perhaps there was a bit more to afforestation than just planting a ton of trees. By the early 1980s someone had invented the word biodiversity and rural landowners, who up until then had cheerfully been industrializing the landscape, were told to start putting it back the way they’d found it—in fact, better than the way they’d found it, if you don’t mind.
“When the National Trust took this place over they probably designated it a PAWS,” said Beverley. Which meant Plantation on Ancient Woodland Site, which led to the next question—what the fuck is an ancient woodland?
“They call it the wildwood,” said Beverley and, according to the men and women with serious beards and slightly windswept hair who make it their business to know this stuff, it used to cover pretty much most of the island of Great Britain. Then, 6,000 years ago, farmers turned up with their fancy genetically modified crops and started clearing the forest out. And what they didn’t clear got eaten away by their artificially mutated cattle, sheep and goats. By the Middle Ages most of it was gone, and Britain entered the Napoleonic War desperate for timber.
“Why do you know all this stuff?” I asked.
“It’s all anyone involved in working the countryside ever talks about,” she said. “That and the vagaries of the EU subsidy regime and how evil the supermarkets are. Anyway, ground cover has a critical impact on water tables and flow rates, so you can bet we all take an interest in that—even Tyburn who’s pretty much a storm drain from one end to the other.”
Beverley pointed out the trees that had been left standing when the area was cleared. A long strip of them went along the river bank and beside the footpaths. “That’s deliberate. Those are remnants of the ancient woodlands,” she said.
“And the weird bit?”
“It’s the timing,” she said. “You don’t just charge in and clear ten hectares of commercial forest—which apart from anything else is worth a ton of money.” So normally you wait for the current crop of western hemlock or Douglas fir or whatever to mature and then you cut them down and replant with historically appropriate broadleaf trees. Forest management not being an industry for people with a short attention span.
But according to the dates we’d seen on the sign, the trees had only been halfway to maturity before they were felled. “That would have been a serious loss of revenue, and I doubt the Forestry Commission would have liked it.”
“And that’s what’s weird, is it?” I asked.
“I told you it wasn’t the kind of weird you wanted,” said Beverley. “What do you want to do now?”
I looked back the way we’d come. The squared-off tower of Aymestrey’s church was visible on the other side of the river, and up the road by the bridge I could see the half-timbered jumble that was the Riverside Inn. It was hot and exposed out among the seedlings and the air was still and close. It was tempting just to walk back down, step into the bar and have a beer or nine. I turned to find Beverley looking at me with concern.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“Let’s go up a bit,” I said.
So we followed the trail as it climbed diagonally across the upper slope of what would be, in another twenty years or so, the ancient Pokehouse Wood. We got a taste of what it might look like when the path turned left into a mature belt of deciduous trees. Near the far edge of the trees the path got steep enough that you ended up using your hands to navigate the last bit, and that meant my eyes were just at the right level to spot the little strip of pink hanging from a strand of the barbed-wire fence, just to the right of the stile.
It was a centimeter wide and about six long. Thick pink cotton, the same shade as that of the Capri pants that Nicole Lacey was thought to have been wearing when she left her house. I froze and told Beverley to stop moving. We’d have to be careful backtracking down the path to avoid contaminating the scene any further.
I leaned forward, put my hand over my mouth, and got as close as I dared. When I was sure there wasn’t any detectable vestigia I leaned back and swore.
“What is it?” asked Beverley.
I nodded at the strip of cloth. Along one side there was a distinctive reddish-brown stain.
We’re the police. We’re accustomed to disappointment. But I’ve never been in a room full of so many dispirited coppers as we had at the evening briefing on Day 6.
Windrow and Edmondson were good, but there was no disguising the litany of non-results. There had been sightings everywhere across the UK, Europe and beyond. Police were turning out from Aberdeen to Marseilles, which was heartening while at the same time being totally futile. In a case involving missing children the good news/bad news routine is always, the bad news is—we haven’t found them yet, and the good news is—we haven’t found them yet . . .
But we had found a strip of pink cloth. Less than two minutes after I’d called it in, a helicopter had gone overhead and less than ten minutes after that the lead elements of the search team in Aymestrey had arrived, red faced, sweating and proving that they were much fitter than I was. They helped secure the site, but as the numbers started to pile up me and Beverley made a tactical retreat.
Windrow and Edmondson invited me down to the nick where we had a two-hour discussion about what led me up that particular path at that particular time. The problem being that a search team had done the whole length of the Mortimer Trail on Day 2 and that strip of pink fabric had not been there when they did it.
When this was reported at the briefing a ripple went through the ranks. I knew what they were thinking—a kidnapping, a plucky but futile escape attempt, recapture by the kidnapper, followed by panic. Followed, with remorseless logic, by death and disposal.
When it was over I slipped out onto the terrace to clear my head.
It was still close enough to sunset for the sky to be dark blue rather than black, but it was already cooler. There was a distinct breeze coming from the west and with it snatches of James Brown and the hum of generators—the drone of a funfair as unmistakable as a bagpipe warming up. Much closer below me I could hear the restless murmur of the media pack as they lapped at the walls of the station.
My phone pinged. The caller ID showed “withheld” but I knew who it was.
Y haven’t you found girls yet?
Beverley was waiting for me outside the cowshed—which would have been encouraging on just about every other night. The door was open and the light was on, casting a yellow rectangle across the bottom of the garden and into the empty orchard beyond.
Either I’d left the door open or Beverley had broken in.
“Dominic’s mum gave me the spare keys,” she said.
“Did you have a good rummage?”
“Yes, thanks.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’m going to bed. You can do what you like.”
“You’re fucking unnatural, you are,” she said,
“Oh, don’t start.”
She stepped over into my line of sight.
“I understand you’ve got self-control and all that,” she said. “I get it. But you’re just . . . fucking unnatural, Peter.”
“Fine,” I said. “You can come to bed too, but I’m still going to go to sleep.”
“Is that what you think I’m talking about?” Beverley folded her arms across her chest.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “Why don’t you just tell me what you’re talking about.”
“You had your hands on the Faceless Man,” she said. “And your best friend stabbed you in the back and you’re just like ‘Oh well you win some, you lose some—ho ho ho.’ Which is fucking unnatural.”
“And you think this is helping?”
“I think it would be useful if you got just a little bit angry,” she said. “I’m not asking you to turn green and go on a rampage but, you know, expressing a little bit of displeasure would not be inappropriate given the circumstances.”
“Like what you’d have done, yeah?” I said because I’m terminally stupid. “Throw a strop—flood out a few homes?”
“That’s different,” said Beverley matter-of-factly. “And, anyway, sometimes it’s you getting angry and sometimes it’s exceptionally heavy rainfall in your catchment area. To be honest, it can be tricky telling the two apart. But that’s me, isn’t it? I’m a goddess, Peter, a creature of temperament and whimsy. I’m supposed to be arbitrary and mercurial—it’s practically my job description. And this isn’t about me.”
“What do you want me to do, Bev? Anything for a quiet life.”
Beverley turned and pointed down at a solitary tree that stood by the garden fence. It was squat and bit twisty; something deciduous is the best I can do.
“Why don’t you blow up the tree?” she said.
“What?”
“Give it a lightning bolt, rip it up by its roots, knock it down—set it on fire?” she trailed off.
“What’s it ever done to me?” I asked.
“It’s a tree,” said Beverley.
“I can’t,” I said.
“They’re not short of trees round here,” she said. “They’re not going to miss it. And in case you’re worried, nobody’s living in it or mystically attached to it. Take some of that anger and let it rip—you’ll feel better.”
“I can’t.”
“Yeah, you can,” she said.
“I can’t.”
“What is wrong with you?”
“I can’t,” I said slowly. “It doesn’t fucking work that way, okay? It’s not about anger, or love or the power of fricking friendship. It’s about concentration, about control.” It’s hard enough to make a forma when you’re hungry let alone when you’re angry. “So you can see that as a form of cathartic release it’s a little bit shit.”
Beverley tipped her head to one side and gave me a long look.
“Okay,” she said and cast around at the base of the tree and came up with a section of branch a shade longer than a baseball bat—she held it out to me. “Hit it with a stick instead.”
“If I hit the tree,” I said, “will you get off my back?”
“Maybe.”
She smiled as I took the branch. The full moon hovered over the roof of the bungalow and I remembered half dreaming the empty orchard full of trees. I strode up to the tree, swung one handed and the impact jarred the branch loose from my fingers.
“That’s pathetic,” called Beverley.
I scooped up the branch and brandished it at the tree.
“Listen,” I said. “I know you trees are up to something.”
And then I smacked it hard with the branch, keep my grip loose so that I wouldn’t let go this time—it did make a satisfying thwack.
“Now, I thought I was dreaming last night,” I said. “But I wasn’t, was I?”
Thwack.
“They were ghost trees . . .”
Thwack.
“Weren’t they? Because people leave a trace behind them. So why shouldn’t trees?”
Smack—a fragment of bark flew off the trunk.
“It doesn’t have to be a big trace, because you’re there for bloody years—aren’t you?”
Smack.
“But you can’t talk because you’re a fucking tree, so really this whole fucking enhanced interrogation shit is a waste of time.” I lowered my branch. “As if it wasn’t always a waste of time.”
I hit the bloody thing as hard as I could, hard enough to numb the palms of my hands, hard enough that the crack echoed off the old wall. Because it’s always a waste of time, all those rushed, angry stupid things you do. They never solve the problems. Because in real life that rush of adrenaline and rage just makes you dumb and seeing red just leads you up the steps to court for something aggravated—assault, battery, stupidity.
I hit the tree again and it hurt my hands even worse.
Because getting angry doesn’t help, or weeping or pleading or just fucking trying to be reasonable. Because she lost her face, man. Because that had to be like having your identity ripped away. Because you’re looking in the mirror and a hideous stranger is staring back. And what would I do if I was her, if I was given that choice—like there would even be a decision. And getting angry doesn’t bring back her face or unmake the choice that she made. Any more than it made a difference when Dad wouldn’t get out of bed or when Mum just flat out told you that your stuff was needed by somebody else. When the people you need stuff from are more interested in something else.
At some point the stick broke.
There were probably manly tears.
Beverley Brook may have put me to bed, or it’s possible I might have done it myself, just as I’ve always done.
I woke up to find the curtains open and my bed bathed in sunshine.
I got into the shower and the hot water stung my palms. There were scrapes and cuts across both my hands.
“You think this is bad,” I told the reflection in the bathroom mirror. “You should see the other guy.”
When I got out of the shower I rolled my shoulders and stretched my neck. I felt better, but there was still a stone in my chest when I thought of Lesley. Some things aren’t fixed by a couple of hours of primal screaming—or whatever that was I’d been doing the night before.
It was Day 7—Hannah and Nicole were still missing.
Me-time was over. There was work to be done.