Read Online The Memory of Trees by F. G. Cottam - Free Book Online Page A

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