28
Saturday 19 July 2014
The trees stood like a silent congregation. The early-morning sun threw shafts of light between the aisles of their trunks and ploughed bright furrows across the woodland’s floor of decomposing leaves. These were city trees, in the less populated reaches of a London park. Still they seemed inviolate, primordial. Sarah remembered vaguely some myth of trees walking, talking, watching. In reality, though, although the woodland itself was ancient most of these trees were not old. Their height and girth measured only the years that had passed since that night in October 1987 when, unforeseen and unchecked, an armada of wind had swept across southern Britain unroofing houses and crushing cars like tin cans.
Some said then that the storm was a punishment for the south’s re-election of Margaret Thatcher but the local councillors had resisted firmly any suggestion of the supernatural. It was a practical matter. Swiftly they completed their necessary meetings and discussions. They bent over papers and signed whatever orders were needed. Funds were released. Earth-movers with caterpillar tracks, and tender saplings – their delicate parts preserved in sacks – were dispatched to the battlefield of stooped trunks and upturned roots.
And perhaps, Sarah thought as she walked steadily along the wooded path; perhaps someone both seen and unseen had come too. Someone quick and furtive in the night. Someone with a body to cradle in a growing hand of roots.
There was no intimation of the devastation now. The trees were not telling. There was only the sound of birdsong.
The site was busy. A couple of uniformed constables were standing at the cordon. Two people in jeans and T-shirts were marking out the ground with white tape. Elaine was standing next to a huge spreading oak with a man in shorts and sandals. Another figure – the geophysicist probably – sat alone on a sandy bank with a laptop. Sarah walked over.
‘Dr Stichill?’
He looked up. ‘You’re Sarah?’
‘That’s right. You’ve started already?’
He glanced over at Elaine and the man she was standing with.
‘Yes, well, your colleague has been very helpful. And Mr Medcalfe, of course. Thanks to him, we know exactly where the school helped with the planting. Luckily it’s a relatively small area.’
‘Great. If you don’t need me immediately, I’ll go and say hello. I’ll be right back.’
‘No trouble. I’ve got plenty to be getting on with.’
Sarah walked over to Elaine and the man she was standing with. She stretched out her hand to him. ‘Mr Medcalfe?’
Medcalfe was tall, late seventies probably, his tightly corkscrewed hair cut close to his head, perfectly grey, like soft lambswool. A simple checked cotton shirt, a lanyard with a key on it round his neck, blue shorts that finished below the knee, the slight knots of varicose veins beneath the dusky black skin of his calves. His handshake was quick and strong. The stressed ‘r’s of the Caribbean had not left him, nor the rhythm that made it sound as though the simplest sentence carried a hidden pleasure.
‘Detective Sarah Collins?’
‘That’s right. Sarah, please. Thanks for making it over so early.’
‘It’s all right. I’m an early riser.’
Sarah glanced at Elaine. ‘You’ve taken a statement already?’
She nodded. ‘Yes.’
Sarah looked back at Medcalfe. ‘You worked for the council, sir?’
He laughed. ‘Nah, Harry.’ He looked around him. ‘Yes. Parks, allotments. Loved it.’
‘And you’re retired now?’
‘Yes, long time now. I’m busy enough.’
‘I’m sure you are. And you remember Mr Stephenson?’
He smiled sceptically. ‘Yes. Him very keen to be part of the planting.’
‘And the volunteers from the school, they only worked here? Nowhere else?’
‘Yes, me sure about that. A hundred and ten per cent.’
Sarah glanced across at Elaine, who nodded. ‘It’s OK, I got it all down in the statement. Harry kept a timetable and a map of who worked where and when. Very organized. We couldn’t be luckier on that score. He’s let me have his notebooks.’
Sarah said, ‘That’s fantastic.’ She turned back to Harry. ‘But you’re not sure about which trees exactly he might have planted.’
Medcalfe laughed. ‘Lord no! But he not plant many, that’s for sure. I think he was here to make an impression. Not to plant trees, no.’ He looked around at the spreading canopy. He was breathing in the woodland. ‘Can you tell which is the youngest?’
‘We’ve got a botanist doing a survey.’
He laughed. ‘You don’t need no botanist!’
Sarah laughed too. ‘Well, we’ve got one.’
He smiled. ‘Me know.’ He stretched out the word sceptically. ‘Pro-cee-dure.’
Sarah smiled. ‘Harry, I can’t thank you enough. Do you need a lift home?’
‘No thanks. I’ll go bore the young people.’ He offered his hand and Sarah shook it again. He looked up along the fissured bark of the oak towards the canopy above. ‘You can’t have this one. This one’s old.’
Sarah looked up too through the map of leaves, almost translucent in the sunlight, and glimpsed the sky beyond, blue and distant. ‘We’ll leave that one alone.’
Harry put his hand flat on the broad trunk of the tree as if it were an old friend that needed comforting.
‘You think you’ll find her?’
‘I don’t know.’
He exhaled sadly. ‘What a thing.’
‘Yes, it is.’
Dr Stichill was younger and shorter than Harry, but he was, somehow, of the same ilk: a lean, practical man. He wore cargo trousers and a Helly Hansen fleece with more pockets than a person could ever need. He patted the ground beside him. ‘Pull up a chair.’
She spread out her mac. ‘So, you’ll have found her by lunchtime?’
He laughed. ‘That’s right. Sooner maybe.’
Sarah rested back on her forearms. ‘Tell me what’s happening now.’
‘We’re looking for anomalies – depressions, that sort of thing. If there’s a body, there will have been decompositional fluid but it might not show up. Depends on all sorts of thing – how long after death she was buried, whether she was clothed, wrapped in any way.’ He nodded in the direction of the young man and woman in jeans who were stretching out tape. ‘My underlings are mapping the site so we can make topographical corrections . . .’
Sarah didn’t need to follow the technical stuff and her attention wandered. She could easily fall asleep on this nice warm hill.
Dr Stichill was wrapping up. ‘I’ll call you if we come up with anything interesting.’
‘Thank you. We’ll have Uniform always on site. My colleague has briefed them, but if anyone seems particularly interested in what you’re doing, be sure to let me know.’
The path back towards the car was marked with objects left prominently for their losers to find. On a fallen tree a pair of sunglasses. Hanging from a branch a beaded necklace, made by some child’s hand. By a drinking fountain a toddler’s drink cup. Sarah found a bench opposite a view of grass that fell away towards trees.
A girl, eight or nine years old, her skin the colour and shine of polished ebony, was cycling slowly through the long grass in a red dress. Her father walked a few feet behind her. At first Sarah thought he was talking with his phone on speaker. Then she realized he was filming his daughter, trying to capture that moment of beauty.
Today was Susie’s memorial service.
Sarah remembered the darkness of the classroom, the ink-stained wooden surface of the desk. They had been revising the Aeneid, reading it aloud, each girl assigned a phrase or a line. A blind professor had come in from the local university and he hadn’t noticed the need to turn on the lights. Her own line had stayed with her forever, as she sat in the deepening gloom, her finger on the page, the words coming up but never reached. Et vastos volvunt ad litora fluctus – ‘and they roll their huge waves towards the shore’. There had been a knock at the door. The school secretary entered, switching on the lights in a blink of fluorescence and asking for Sarah to be excused please. She led Sarah to the headmistress’s office – no, I’m sorry, the headmistress will explain – taking short, hasty steps slightly ahead all the way and remaining behind Sarah in the hallway as she awkwardly reached over and pushed the door and ushered her into the office. The headmistress – red-haired, flamboyant, an Oxford scholar, much admired by both girls and parents – stood up when she entered and said her name with kindness.
Sarah.
Usually the 1970s rectory had been a hub of activity, a place where the door was never shut. Suddenly it had become quiet. The shared areas – the living room, the kitchen, the dining room – were deserted, and she moved through them like an interloper. Her father was praying earnestly, steadfastly in his study, and the door to her parents’ bedroom upstairs was firmly shut. Her mother was not to be disturbed.
Sarah, off school until after the funeral, sat on the sofa and flicked through TV channels with the sound off. The doorbell rang constantly, and even though her attention was focused nowhere in particular, it was only reluctantly that she got up to answer the sympathetic parishioners who stood with arms outstretched holding casseroles and cakes. Her father was loved by his congregation and they wanted to help. This was all they could think of. They came in, offered to make tea. They cleared up the kitchen and asked how her parents were doing. When her eyes filled, they quickly changed the subject, found something useful to do like cleaning the floor.
After they had left, the cakes remained: confectionery oxymorons, bitter sweetnesses, exuberant expressions of a compassion that no one could bear. Coffee and walnut. Victoria sponge that tasted of sand. The tins, too – pictures of hens, of hot air balloons – splendidly inappropriate, bunting at a bomb site. A vast loneliness was the overwhelming sensation. Susie had gone. Dear Susie: practical, straightforward, warm, funny. Sarah had taken her for granted. Susie was just there. She wasn’t the stuff of tragedy. She was stupid jokes and having a good time. She’d been as assumed and as necessary as water and daylight. What kind of a God could click his fingers and snuff her out?
Then there was the funeral. Her mother had come downstairs, her face forever altered, and life had resumed. But without Susie, the house was silenced. How could Sarah not have thought that God, in his perversity, had taken the wrong child?
She stirred. She should get back to work.
A family walked by – children of different ages, two dogs, a baby on a man’s shoulders, her hand curled round her father’s neck – and it seemed suddenly to Sarah that if a distant satellite had a camera with a lens designed to seek out human happiness, then this park would glow through the darkness of space. Perhaps there was some kindness after all if this was the place where Tania had been resting.
She reached in her bag and dug out her purse. Caroline’s number was in there and she dialled it and left a voicemail.
‘It’s Sarah here. You know, the police officer? I’m really sorry about the other day. I was awful. I’m a bit busy for the next few days, but if you could face seeing me, perhaps we could meet up and have that drink when things have calmed down.’