He decided to walk to the Coine Tree. It was a mile downstream, and from there he could walk to a nearby village and catch the bus home.

  He trudged the lonely track, until he came to a sign, an old white and black iron sign pointing downstream to ULLATHORNE, 7 MILES, OR WEST TO THE FAMED COINE TREE, ½ MILE.

  Karl was about to cut inland. Before he left the river behind, he stopped to look at it again. Something real was invested in its movement. Below him, below an overhanging rock, thick with moss, was a narrow beach. He and Bev had picnicked there many times, lit a fire, smoked and kissed. There were good flat pebbles there, for skimming. On a good day, with a good whip of his arm, he could flip one and reach the other side. A swift white trail of skimming kisses across the water. It was a good beach.

  He moved to the edge and looked down at it. Caught up on the flat exposed rocks near the edge of the beach was a white dead body. A slump of flesh, chewed and spat out by waterfall, rapids and river. It had a battered brown pulpy head like a large rotting apple, and an open mouth smashed of its teeth. A single eye, red and open and staring. The body was half naked. Things were amiss: one leg was bent cruelly back, folded against the back, its knee bulbous and distended. One of its arms was missing. Instead, there was the gape of an open shoulder, and dark red and purple sinews were held loosely inside. Karl began to feel sick.

  The sunlight shifted, dappling through the river’s moving face, bleeding a stream of light across the chest of the man. It illuminated the script inscribed on the twisted body, in a vivid black tattoo: the letters of the alphabet, numbers from 0 to 9, Yes, No, Hello, Goodbye, the sun and the moon.

  Karl founded himself kneeling. He waited until he was breathing steadily again. Then he reached for his phone, and called the police.

  36.

  Days later, miles south of the river Tyr, in the never-ending purring hum of London, Alison Harmire lay in bed, pale under the tawny light of the city, her children asleep.

  They lay either side of her in their pyjamas, breathing heavily. She gently moved a damp lock of hair from her son’s forehead, his closed eyes as smooth as shells. His tears had dried.

  The house was empty now; Nigel had packed his cases and finally gone. She gently moved her daughter’s head and arm from her chest, and slid out of the bed. She padded across the room. The wardrobe was still open, with Nigel’s rails cleared. She slid it shut.

  She looked back briefly to her sleeping children as she moved through the dark of the hall to the stairs.

  The lights in the white kitchen glowed from copper pans and neatly arranged pots, a bowl of luminous lemons, and the clutched petals of flowers in vases. She moved past them all, into her study. She flicked on a soft standing light, and sat at her desk. The blinds were drawn. The room flashed briefly with the yellow flare of a passing car.

  She pulled the scroll of laminated plastic from under her wood and glass desk. Printed neatly on one side were the letters of the alphabet, as well as HELLO, GOODBYE, the sun and the moon, and the numbers 0 to 9.

  Alison took the small shot glass. She had stolen it from the Lion, thirty years ago. She placed it carefully in the centre of the board. She waited for it to answer, as it always had, all these years. Advice, confusion, shattered poetry, and a psalter of repeated phrases. Mantras for life from the board of the dead.

  But, this night, the glass did not move. It stood dead under her finger. Sorley was gone. From the land of the dead, to nothingness. There would be no more. Alison sat back in her chair, and rubbed her eyes.

  She held her head in her hands. She was alone, again.

  East of Alison Harmire’s house, in the shadow of the House of Commons, Knott was leaning on the stone parapet of a bridge. The Thames flowed thick and strong underneath. It had been a long day. He pulled his collar up to his thick face. The streetlamp’s fragile light was lengthened and torn by the moving waters below.

  Knott’s phone buzzed with a message. He walked along the bridge, and a black car pulled up by the Westminster security gate.

  He stepped into the long, low car.

  A blond woman sat on the back seat in a grey-green suit, neat as pins. Next to her, a crumpled-face old man in smart country clothes. It was Raymond. Opposite them, Alyce sat, rapt in her phone.

  “Mr. Knott, good evening,” Raymond said.

  “How do.” Knott nodded. “Alyce,” he added.

  Alyce looked up, her violet eyes flashing in the city lights.

  The car was moving at pace, gliding through the stuttering London traffic, past Westminster Abbey, wending its way to the airport for a brief journey north.

  “You will know Sally,” Raymond said, opening a hand towards the woman with blond hair.

  The woman nodded to Knott, and smiled.

  “Of course,” Knott said. “Seen her on the telly.”

  The woman smiled and looked out of the window to the smear of light and darkness outside. The immensity of it all.

  “The new candidate for Tyrdale, Mr. Knott,” Raymond said, gently reproving.

  “So I’ve seen,” Knott said.

  “You will know Alyce, who will be Sally’s principal support, and you will, of course, have seen what has been reported about our former colleague,” Raymond said, evenly.

  Knott shrugged. “Sad,” he said.

  “Tragedy,” Alyce said.

  “Very unfortunate,” Sally said.

  “Indeed,” Raymond added, and patted Sally’s knee. “Well, he can join his wife at last—which, I think we can agree, is some kind of justice. So, that is the end of that story. But not for us. We remain—and continue.”

  Karl and Bev had lit the new fire pit in their back garden. Karl had put paving stones and a heavy metal basin over the freshly turned soil. Now, the flames flickered and spat with green wood, dancing in the gathering twilight. Now, Karl was strumming a guitar.

  A recent newspaper was beside Bev, gently rippling in the evening air, with a lurid headline about Gary Watson MP, found dead in the river.

  She took the front page from the paper and scrunched it into a loose ball, and tossed it gently into the warming fire. She put her head on Karl’s shoulder, and he stopped strumming, and put his arm around her, and they watched the flames consume it all.

  In the fire, Watson’s face blackened and shrivelled, and then collapsed, and crumbled, and was lost in a sudden flaring gout of green flame.

  Karl took up his guitar again, and picked out a new tune.

  “I’m sorry, love,” she said, at last.

  “Don’t worry. It’s nowt,” he said, over the chords. “Don’t worry.”

  Bev gently hummed along to his sweet, melancholy strum, and she looked past the dancing fire and out over the garden fence to the old moor and the ancient trees. Her sight rested on the old stones on the high hills. They, at least, would remain.

  Until all the days, like even these days, were no more.

  It was dark at the Gildersleve Bed and Breakfast in Ullathorne.

  Ashley was in her room, her face lit silver by the laptop screen. A cursor pulsed at the end of a sentence. She did not know what would come next.

  She was trying to write, her mind drifting in and out of concentration. She wrote as best she could: her left hand fully in control, a single finger ready to type on her closed right hand. She had removed distractions—she had turned her music off, she had switched off the Wi-Fi on the router in the hall. But her mind was flitting and flyting.

  Ashley sighed and slapped the laptop shut. Her mother had left her a list of chores, and wanted them done by the time she got back. She was out. Seeing to something that needed done, she said. Off to see the cops, she had said, about the football jersey. Now that Alison had gone back down to London.

  Ashley walked into the room where the Glaswegian reporter had stayed. It had not been cleaned. It was unkempt and lank with the sadness of abandonment. She began slowly stripping the bed. There were two used mugs on the sideboard, with cold coffee congealed in small pools. A single black and silver sock lay alone near the television.

  There was a small polished pebble on the side by the night-light. Ashley picked it up. It was as smooth as an eye. It had a stripe of paler rock within it. She put it in her pocket.

  Then she noticed a note ripped from a reporter’s pad which had been dropped under the bed. Its curled edge was in sight. She picked it up. It was scribbled in a mix of shorthand and longhand, in a pen that was low on ink.

  Ashley could not understand the shorthand marks, a series of half-letters and swooshes, of dots and contractions. It seemed to be another language entirely. But at the bottom of the note, beside a large asterisk and a doodle of a heart, Shona had written a message to herself.

  It said: Call V.

  Ashley took the note, crumpled it up, threw it in a bin bag, and stood up with a sigh.

  She stripped the bed, hoovered the carpet and wiped the surfaces. It now looked tidy and ready for another visitor. It was an empty, barely furnished room, waiting for another person to arrive, and live, and depart.

  Shona Sandison had left no mark on it. It was as if she had never been there at all.

  The front room in Inspector Benedict Reculver’s spacious Edinburgh apartment was filled with light on a quiet Sunday morning.

  The clear sunlight fell on the silver frames of the paintings in lancing gleams, and lay warm on the sleek surfaces of his lean furniture. In the bathroom, a man was showering. He was singing a sad Gallic song.

  Reculver, in a loose green silk robe, elaborate dragons swimming about his limbs, rubbed his face and smiled. He was sitting on his sofa, reading the Sunday papers, which had been pushed through his letter box early, its many slippery supplements sliding away from the paper in a glossy coiled pile.

  He knew Gary Watson MP had been found dead in a river: it had led the BBC news for two days, and his colleagues in the north of England had been in touch.

  He imagined journalists from all newspapers now descending on Tyrdale to cover the story, to dig out their own information, to interview the locals, to find new lines and fresh takes. But Shona Sandison had them all—that story was written. She had the whole story, and, it seemed, all the follow-up tales, too. She had not named several sources. Some of Watson’s school friends were quoted, but left anonymous. Reculver raised an eyebrow: he wondered why.

  One tabloid had given over its front page to her story, as well as several pages inside. Shona’s fingers must be several millimetres shorter, Reculver mused. Her boss at the Buried Lede had clearly struck a good deal with the paper, even if all the subtleties and ambiguities of what Shona had discovered had been hacked and mauled into a brutal tabloid style. He read it again:

  DEATH MP “MURDER” LINK SHOCK EXCLUSIVE: MYSTERY OF LOST BOY AND DROWNED WATSON

  GARY Watson, the controversial MP found dead this week, can be linked to the suspected murder of a former school friend thirty years ago, the Sunday Despatch can sensationally reveal.

  The mutilated body of Watson, 49, found in the river Tyr, County Durham, the day after the launch of his reelection bid, has thrown the general election campaign into chaos.

  Today we can reveal a shocking hidden life which would have derailed Watson’s career if he had not mysteriously fallen to his death.

  An Exclusive Investigation by award-winning reporter SHONA SANDISON can reveal:

  • The sinister links between Watson and the tragic disappearance of school friend Andrews Banks in 1992.

  • New evidence linked to vanished Banks has been handed to cops after being found in recent weeks.

  • How the outspoken populist MP attacked our reporter after being confronted at his fiery campaign launch hours before his death.

  • The occult teenage gang in which Watson was a key member.

  • The mysterious murder of his ex-Army school friend.

  • The shocking suicide at a Scottish wedding linked to Watson’s bizarre obsession with Ouija boards.

  The story went on, covering the front page, and pages two, three, four and five inside. In the magazine supplement, there was a brief picture-profile of Watson, and a colour piece on Tyrdale, also penned by Sandison.

  Reculver looked up. His friend, a white towel tied tight around his limber slick torso, had brought him an espresso in a fine china cup. A small brown wrinkled biscuit had been placed on the neat saucer.

  “Merci beaucoup,” Reculver said. His visiting French friend slinked away. Reculver read some of the colour piece, a feature illustrated with luminous photography:

  At the heart of the valley of the river Tyr is an ancient giant. They call it the Coine Tree.

  Few people from outside the valley know of it. Tyrdale and its market town of Ullathorne are better known for their natural beauty, with tourists flocking to the pretty town to view its ruined castle and walk in the idyllic glades of woodland beside its famous river. But at the dark green centre of those ancient woods is that tree—said to be the oldest in England. Some say it is the biggest, too. The monstrous tree has been standing deep in the valley’s native woodland for three thousand years. It stands as an ancient, silent witness.

  What has this wordless giant seen? A long, troubled span of human time. It has seen the people of Tyrdale emerge from the dark green prehistorical world, from the era of clans and tribes and pagan belief, to the Roman Empire, and the coming of Christianity. It has seen the people of the dale overcome the brutalities of Norman invasion and feudal rule, the ravages of plague and cholera, the devastating disruptions of the Industrial Revolution, the loss and sorrow of two world wars, and the social and economic revolutions of the twentieth century.

  In all this time, it has gripped the same parcel of soil and stone not far from the ancient river Tyr. It has endured and grown imperceptibly while generations of humans have been born, lived and died. Both hollow and alive, the tree will stand long after the grim story of Gary Watson and his troubled school friends has been long forgotten.

  Looking back on my days investigating this story in Ullathorne, it is tempting to see this deeply impressive, unmoving but living thing as a powerful symbol of all that has been discovered.

  Like the branches and trunk and leaves of the ancient tree, parts of the story exist in the world of the visible: the disappearance of Banks in 1992, the rise of Watson to fame and success and then the very public death of Daniel Merrygill.

  But this tree also exists in the world of the unseen. Just as the Coine Tree’s roots plunge unseen into the rock and soil of the ancient dale, so do the roots of this tragic story. So much is still unclear, and so much is subterranean. Banks’s body has never been found. The reasons for his disappearance and likely death remain unknown. And the occult shadows that drove Merrygill to his untimely end, and which clearly engulfed that small group of Tyrdale teenagers in the early 1990s, remain largely unknowable, and may remain lost to the sunken past forever . . .

  “Breakfast?” a voice called from Reculver’s echoing New Town kitchen.

  Reculver bellowed an agreement and stood up, dropping the paper on his coffee table. He reached for his personal mobile phone, which lay on the marble mantelpiece.

  He looked down at the paper: it had wrung the story for all it was worth. Above the newspaper title, it boasted: LOST LEADER: WHICH MINISTRY WAS SET ASIDE FOR GARY WATSON? Page 9 for insight and another puff said: WHERE NOW FOR PM’S NORTHERN STRATEGY? Comment section.

  His thumbs moved over the phone’s black screen.

  Bravo! he texted Shona.

  He looked at his screen for a moment, and then put it down. There was no reply, and he suspected there would not be one for several days.

  In the kitchen, an egg was cracked onto a sizzling pan, and moved from slick translucent liquid to the firm and the white and the edible.

  good bye

  Shona Sandison took a long, slow walk in the gentle sunshine. Spring had finally arrived in Edinburgh, and a field of blaring daffodils, as yellow and vivid as smashed eggs, blazed beside her. She paused and sat on a bench in Victoria Park, an acre of flat green grass and old trees between the burr of Ferry Road and the pretty harbour at Newhaven. She lay her stick beside her.

  A small blue coffee van, smooth and neat like a beetle, was serving hot coffee to tired parents and dog walkers. In the playground, children in raincoats clambered over a large colourful climbing frame. In the unlikely warmth, tall boys were throwing around a basketball on the nearby fenced court.

  Shona looked to the coffee van and thought about buying a drink.

  The BBC had been leading on her story in the Sunday paper, and was running news bulletins on the links between the death of Watson and the human wreckage of Tyrdale.

  Ranald had already been asked by Durham police to hand over the audio file of Shona’s interview with the late MP.

  The prime minister was beginning to be asked questions about how well he knew Watson, what he knew and when he knew it. It was disrupting his election campaign. There was a chance that her story would begin to dominate the news cycle. Ranald told her that a young woman from Spennymoor in the northeast of England had made a five-figure deal with a rival tabloid, claiming to be Watson’s lover.

  Terry’s photographs were everywhere—expertly taken in the heat of the moment, and pin-sharp. One of them showed the MP grasping Shona by her neck. Shona’s face was impassive, her eyes wide. Her stick on the floor. Watson’s grim shiny face was a tangled root of hatred. It was believed to be the last photo of him alive.

  Reculver had texted her, but she was ignoring him, for now. It felt like work. Her phone buzzed again. It was a text from Hector Stricken.

  Your stuff is bloody everywhere! Great job. Beautiful job, pal!

  It’s been emotional, she texted back. The sun flashed on her phone screen. A tiny brown dog with a face like an otter ran up to her feet, snuffled at her stick and sprinted off again.

  More to come?

  Not from me. I’m done, she printed with her thumb.

  Another text zipped to her phone.

 

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