The Hollow Tree Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also available from James Brogden and Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1: Hand of Glory

  1: Collision

  2: Amputation

  3: Recovery

  4: Home

  5: Rehabilitation

  6: The Devil’s Coach-Horse

  7: Prosthesis

  8: Smoky

  9: The Mary Oak

  10: Infection

  11: Gypsy Witch

  12: The Stand-Off

  13: Nazi Spy

  14: The Mirror Box

  15: Whore

  16: Nightmares

  2: Her Strong Enchantments

  17: The Hospital

  18: The Monument

  19: Annabel

  20: The Sight

  21: Telling Tom

  22: Noz

  23: Static

  24: Attack

  25: Aftermath

  26: Eline

  27: The Hive

  28: Fire

  29: Asylum

  30: The Small Man’s Prize

  3: The Umbra

  31: Near Death

  32: Ghosts

  33: Liaison

  34: Gigi

  35: The Tale of Black Meg

  36: Shuffling Off

  37: Unreal City

  38: Appetites

  39: Queen of Air and Darkness

  40: Beatrice

  41: The Hollow Tree

  42: Cats for You

  After

  Afterword & Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also Available from Titan Books

  THE

  HOLLOW

  TREE

  Also available from James Brogden and Titan Books

  Hekla’s Children

  THE

  HOLLOW

  TREE

  JAMES

  BROGDEN

  TITAN BOOKS

  The Hollow Tree

  Print edition ISBN: 9781785654404

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785654411

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: March 2018

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2018 by James Brogden. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  For ‘Bella’

  MARY IN THE OAK TREE

  COLD AS COLD CAN BE

  WAITING FOR THE SKY TO FALL

  WHO WILL DANCE WITH ME?

  TRADITIONAL BIRMINGHAM SKIPPING SONG

  PROLOGUE

  5th May 1945

  NATURE ABHORS A VACUUM, OR SO IT IS SAID.

  Sergeant Nicholas Raleigh and Corporal Rhys Hughes, both of the 9th Bomb Disposal Company, Royal Engineers, looked down at the smooth grey curve of steel, which broke the surface of the ground like a half-submerged sea monster. Surrounding them, the woods of the Lickey Hills were coming into leaf, bright with sunshine and the songs of birds. Meanwhile the bomb at their feet lay in the middle of it all, smug and insolent.

  Sergeant Raleigh tilted his cap back and scratched his head, frowning. ‘Thousand-pounder, you suppose?’

  ‘Give or take an ounce,’ answered Corporal Hughes. He was sitting on a log and eating a cheese sandwich. Coming from a long line of Welsh miners, he’d taken to the Royal Engineers as if born to it. The vast majority of the unexploded ordnance they encountered was in Birmingham – spread out down at the foot of the hills in a grey haze – dealt with in a claustrophobic chaos of shattered buildings and the stench of burning, so he was enjoying the rare chance for a day out in the fresh air, and this place was as good as any for a picnic.

  Raleigh didn’t seem to be appreciating the occasion. He was tall and rangy, and some might have said humourless with it, but surviving three years in a post of which the life expectancy was normally measured in months would do that to a man.

  ‘How long d’you reckon it’s been lying there?’ asked Hughes.

  ‘Last raid was back in forty-three,’ mused Raleigh. ‘So two years at least. They’ll have been trying to hit the Austin works. This one’s fallen much too short for a simple miss. Probably found things a bit hotter than they expected and dumped the weight before scarpering.’ He looked around. ‘Good news is that there’s nothing nearby.’

  The Lickeys were a small range of hills to the south of Birmingham, a well-loved pleasure spot for city-dwellers looking to escape for day trips. A little over a mile from where they were standing, they could see the rooftops of the Austin works, pitted and painted green to look like ordinary farmland, where plane and machine parts for the war effort were made. The bomb had been found by a local gamekeeper who had alerted the Home Guard, and after checking to make sure there weren’t any more in the vicinity, a wide safety cordon had quickly been established. There might have been a few folks up here strolling or picnicking, but nowhere near danger, and other than the tram terminus and the Bilberry Tea Rooms at the bottom, the nearest human habitation was a good half-mile distant.

  Corporal Hughes stood, brushing crumbs off his knees and tugging his uniform jacket down over his comfortably proportioned belly. ‘So are we going to blow it up then, Sarge, or not?’

  Raleigh favoured him with a grim smile. ‘Why yes, Corporal, I rather think we are.’

  * * *

  The explosion was quite literally earth-shaking. Birds burst from the trees as a massive geyser of dirt, leaves and bits of tree fountained into the air and rained debris over a wide area, just as echoes of the detonation rolled out from the hills and over the city below. The silence that followed it was almost as deafening, and in that frozen moment fearful and wondering eyes turned to the sky. When the last fragments had fallen, Sergeant Raleigh and Corporal Hughes approached to inspect the damage.

  Hughes placed his hands on his hips and gave a low, awed whistle. ‘Well that’ll clear your tubes and no mistake,’ he said.

  It appeared as if God Himself had reached down and scooped out a sixty-foot wide handful of the hillside, leaving mounds of soil and rocks settling back into the crater in small avalanches, and splintered trees about the periphery. All that remained of the bomb was a twisted fragment of tail fin right at the very bottom and a litter of leaf debris that had been sucked into the crater by the blast’s initial vacuum.

  ‘You’re not wrong,’ Raleigh replied. ‘Right, let’s get the worst of it.’

  They set to giving the immediate area a quick once-over for the largest and most obvious pieces of shrapnel, to be dumped in the crater and covered over. It would not be many more seasons before the woods reclaimed the spot as if nothing had ever happened; as if there had been no such things as war, or bombs. Already birdsong was slowly returning to the woods, filling the shocked silence.

  Raleigh’s explorations were interrupted by a sudden cry o
f alarm from Hughes. ‘Sarge!’ he called. ‘Come quick!’

  He found Corporal Hughes standing by the wide trunk of an old, dead oak tree. It had succumbed to either lightning or disease many years ago, and it had sheared off about seven feet from the ground, the remains of its limbs being little more than stark, fingerless stumps. The explosion had caused a great split to open up in it, a ragged fissure revealing that the trunk was hollow. At the bottom, in the shadow of a shallow well formed by the centre of the roots, he made out the deeper darkness of an eye socket staring back at him, and he recoiled.

  ‘Sweet Mary mother of God,’ he breathed.

  The skull was lying on a pile of what he at first took to be old sticks, but then saw that they were ribs, leg bones, arm bones, the blocky lumps of vertebrae and a littering of fingers and toes. Stuffed into the hollow trunk, the corpse had been unable to fall and had simply rotted where it stood, the disarticulated remains collapsing through themselves and into a jumbled pile with the skull uppermost, staring up at the opening in the top of the broken trunk, which was forever beyond reach. There was fabric – too stained to tell the colour or whether it was shirt, trousers, or dress – and strands of dark hair still attached to the skull.

  Hughes’ normally ruddy face was pale, and he was making strange gulping noises as his cheese sandwich threatened to rebel.

  Both men had seen their fair share of death: bodies mangled and torn apart by German bombs, burned in fires, lacerated by shrapnel, crushed by fallen buildings, or any one of a dozen other ways a person could be killed. Neither could claim to be unaffected, but you took a deep breath and you carried on and you did your job. It was horrific, but explainable, and hard to think of as murder. It was war. This, however, was something entirely different, and coming as it did in what should have been a place of natural beauty and tranquillity gave it a particular sense of violation.

  Hughes had managed to get himself under control. ‘Poor bugger. Who do you think he was?’

  * * *

  The police were called, but they could not discover the identity of the corpse beyond that it was the remains of a young woman. No witnesses came forward, and as the hills lay right on the boundary between the districts of Birmingham and Bromsgrove the investigation was passed back and forth between the two county constabularies until the threads of the investigation were hopelessly tangled and eventually lost altogether.

  Still, nature abhors a vacuum, and no more so than the hole left by a soul taken friendless, anonymous and alone. Like air, or birdsong, myth floods in to fill the gap.

  HAND OF GLORY

  1

  COLLISION

  RACHEL COOPER STARES DOWN INTO THE BLACK GULF where the two steel hulls meet. A second ago they were approaching each other with the ponderous inevitability of thunderstorms, and she was scrabbling with slippery feet to get out of the way. In a second’s time they will rebound, and the two narrowboats will go on their ways, fifteen tons apiece. Her fascination lies in the fact that at this moment her lower left forearm is down there between the two of them, in the black canal water, and there is absolutely nowhere near enough space for something as thick as a human arm to be in such a place.

  At this moment there is no pain. Pain will come later – that and much, much worse. For now there is only a dull surprise, as if to say ‘How on earth did my arm get down there?’

  A stupid, meaningless accident, that is how.

  * * *

  Black Knight Boats operated a narrowboat hire company out of Stoke Pound on the Worcester and Birmingham canal, offering holidaymakers access to the heart of the country’s inland waterway network at a sedate four miles an hour, and a slightly eye-watering price tag. It catered mostly to empty-nesters and young middle-class families with illusions of enjoying a carefree and nomadic lifestyle, and it had taken Rachel months to convince Tom that it was their sort of thing.

  ‘I am not spending a week of my summer holiday farting around in the Black Country on a barge like some old man,’ he’d protested. ‘If you really want to see smashed-up warehouses and drowned shopping trolleys, get in the car, we’ll be there in half an hour.’ What was wrong with Greece? he’d wanted to know. It was hotter, it was cheaper, there was room service and a pool. Which meant it might as well have been anywhere, Rachel had countered; she wanted to see where she lived. Why didn’t she just look out the bloody window, then? he’d hmphed.

  Variations on a theme, all through autumn last year.

  She’d clinched it on the traditional Cooper family Boxing Day canal walk, that feat of domestic organisation which saw Tom, his mother Charlotte and his dad Spence, Gramps, sister Rosie and her husband Clive and brood of four, not to mention assorted dogs, bikes, hangers-on, boyfriends, girlfriends, and newer additions like Rachel herself, all pile into a small fleet of SUVs to walk off some of the festive bloat with a slow stroll up the canal to the Tardebigge Reservoir and back. Coming as she did from a much smaller family of just herself, her mother, an elderly great-grandmother known to all as ‘Gigi’ and a variety of distant uncles and aunts whom she rarely saw, Rachel loved immersing herself in the fuggy, jumbling chaos of Tom’s extended family, and even after three years was still surprised by how Charlotte welcomed her so unquestioningly and uncritically into the bosom of her tribe.

  She and Tom had fallen back from the main mob and were walking with grandfather – fag on and fuck the doctors; Gramps had smoked since he was fourteen and what the bloody hell did they know about any of it – squelching along the muddy towpath, when they’d passed The Queens Head on the other side. It was busy with Boxing Day drinkers, many of them sitting muffled up in the beer garden under wide patio heaters.

  Tom rubbed his hands against the chill. ‘I could just about do with a pint,’ he said.

  Gramps snorted. ‘You don’t want to drink there. It’s all beer with goblins on and pulled pork and quinn-ower. Get yourself over to The Weighbridge at Alvechurch Marina. They do a good drop of ale.’

  ‘Could you get there by boat?’ Rachel wondered.

  ‘I should say so. It’s only a couple of miles further up. You’d pass a few decent pubs on the way.’

  ‘You don’t say.’ She nudged Tom. ‘Quite a few decent pubs, the man says. Just think, darling,’ she cooed, taking his arm and snuggling up against his shoulder. ‘A week-long pub crawl through the Black Country, lazy summer days. You, captain of your own vessel; me, lying on the roof, in the sun, in my bikini…’

  Gramps sniffed. ‘I’d take her up on that, son, before she changes her mind.’

  So they’d walked up to the reservoir and back, and kept going down to where Black Knight had their office and dozens of boats moored in the pound being refitted for the tourist season, and booked it then and there.

  * * *

  Her wedding ring, she realises, is on that hand, down there, in the dark. In the frozen moment between when everything was perfect and when everything will be crushed and broken. Part of her hopes that it slips off and falls into the silt, because at least that way there’s a chance that it might be rescued.

  * * *

  There was nothing lazy about the long, hot summer days that began that week. Tom was captain; that was non-negotiable. He even bought a hat. Rachel spent weeks putting together the most versatile wardrobe for a boating holiday – lots of Breton stripes and canvas.

  A half-day’s induction by the Black Knight people had shown them how to drive the boat, perform basic maintenance checks and operate the canal locks, and it was then Rachel realised how badly she’d misunderstood the role of first mate. She’d thought she’d be lounging on the roof in a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses with a glass of wine and the latest Joanne Harris, while Tom took care of the mechanical side of things. Her only experience of boats had been as a child on Edgbaston Reservoir, where she’d been taught to sail by her dad in light, easily handled Picos. She hadn’t factored in that a narrowboat would have to be manoeuvred while the locks were operated, and that this would
be her job. Each lock had two pairs of massive swinging wooden gates that she had to open and shut, shoving at them like a donkey on a treadmill, and then she had to crank the sluice gates either open or closed with a metal device that looked like a tyre iron. Despite the fact that her desk job involved watching closed-circuit television monitors of a stretch of the M5 motorway for the Highways Agency and included the routine lifting of nothing heavier than a box-file, she kept herself reasonably fit by running – but lock gates involved a whole different set of muscles, and soon her back and arms were killing her.

  What made it worse was that there were thirty of these locks on the Tardebigge Flight up into Birmingham. They had to stop halfway through for the night, during which she was good for nothing except demanding a back rub.

  Stiffness and fatigue were mostly to blame for the accident.

  They’d made it into Gas Street Basin right in the centre of Birmingham, which was busy with the multi-coloured liveries of dozens of boat companies, polished brass glittering in the sun, cascading colour from hanging baskets and flower boxes, streamers and pennants. There were no locks to open or close, so she sat in the bow and drank in the life and colour, but it was more of a navigational challenge for Tom at the stern, avoiding so many other craft, and she could see that they were drifting dangerously close to one of them. It was a café narrowboat, with large windows where tourists sat eating their lunch, cruising even more slowly than themselves, and the captain at the back could see that Tom was having trouble keeping a safe distance.

  ‘Oi!’ he shouted. ‘Watch yourself there!’

  ‘It’s okay, honey!’ she called to Tom. ‘I’ll fend us off!’

  There was a long wooden pole clipped to the roof which she should have used, but that would have involved climbing all the way up there and dragging it back down, whereas she was sitting at the front already, and the side of the restaurant boat was coming right towards her. It wasn’t as if they were going to hit it outright – they were going to glance it at worst, and maybe not make contact at all. All she had to do was lean over and give it a good shove with both hands; mass and momentum being what they were, she wouldn’t have to deflect it by much, and it only needed an inch or two.