A Poison Tree (Time, Blood and Karma Book 3) (9 page)

12

DAVID

Yggdrasil.

It
is the name given to the monstrous ash tree of Norse mythology.

“We should review all of our branches.”

According to the collection of old Icelandic poems known as the
Elder Edda
, the tree’s upper trunk supports the home of the gods, Asgard, while beneath its roots lie the three worlds of men, Frost Giants and Niflheim – the place of the dead. The old texts, only a few of which still survive thanks to the destructive zeal of Christian priests, paint a picture of a fatalistic religion. Courage and self-sacrifice are paramount. All heroes perish. Darkness abounds.

“I’m hoping this year they will all be in the black.”

Furthermore, unlike in other religions, the austere Norsemen foretell the ultimate defeat of the gods at the hands of the brutal Giants, and the end of the universe. Serpents gnaw at one of Yggdrasil’s roots and will eventually destroy the tree, since like the gods it is doomed to die. At this point reality collapses into the void.

“You think so?”

These gloomy thoughts in my head have not been triggered so much by my recent emotional conflicts, but rather by the experience of sitting in the brooding presence of Odin, aka Edward Braddock, reviewing yet more sales projections. True, he does not enjoy the actual attributes of divinity – except perhaps eternal life – neither does he have only one eye, wolves crouching at his feet, or ravens perched on his shoulders. He does, though, possess an aloofness and solemnity that would not be out of place in the Teutonic pantheon.

“I think so.”

Where is Thor’s hammer when you need it, eh? That’s what I’d like to know.

Trees.

I see them everywhere. I see too many trees and not enough wood, if my father is to be believed. The way those with a sixth sense see dead people.

Maybe that’s not
so surprising. After all, according to the Norse poets, the first man was fashioned from an ash and the first woman from an elm. After that, I guess humanity sort of branched out …

“Are you listening, David?”

“Sorry, what?”

Edward Braddock sighed.

I needed a drink.
And a cigarette.

“Harry seems to be getting to grips with the Coventry business,” observed Braddock Senior.

“Yes, he’s doing all right.”

“Are you going to make him permanent?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“You should decide. You don’t want to piss him off any more than you have done already. It doesn’t pay to make enemies, David.”

I know that.

Enemies send you anonymous letters.

Enemies hate you.

Over dinner, Claire said, “Oh, David, before I forget.”

“Yes?”

“I’ll be staying away in London for two nights in August. There’s a finance conference I need to go to.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“I have every confidence it won’t be.”

“Is anyone else going?”

“No, just me and the credit card. I might indulge in a bit of retail therapy while I’m there.”

“Not even Jack?”

“Darling, this is a
finance
conference. Way too boring and detailed for Jack. That’s what he employs me for.”

“Presumably this is after we’ve been to Bali?”

“Of course, silly. It’s from the twenty-third to the twenty-fifth. I’m not going to mess up our holiday, am I?”

Jack
. Crusty and rather grizzled. Unsophisticated. Not Claire’s type at all.

And yet over the last few months, as the demons of jealousy and suspicion ha
d been drilling in my brain with their dirty little jackhammers, his was the name that kept cropping up.

Claire
saw him every day. They were relaxed together. I could visualise him touching her arm, leaning over her desk, making some jokey remark.

The day after my dinner conversation with Claire, I checked the details I’d copied from the scrap of paper in her purse.
The dates matched.

I sat in my office and looked at the ceiling for a while.  Then I went on the
web to find the phone number for the Imperial Hotel, Kensington. I pressed the relevant buttons on my desk phone.

When
a young woman answered, I gave my name as Mr. Irving and said I was checking that my secretary had made a reservation for me in August.

“Could I have your Christian name, sir?”

“Jack.”

I heard the tap, tap, tap of fingers on a computer keyboard.

“Yes, sir, two nights from the twenty-third, checking out on the twenty-fifth.”

“
Good.  Could you confirm the rate and details, please?”

“One hundred and seventy pounds per night, executive bedroom for two adults with a king-size bed.”

“That’s fine. Thank you.”

“Thank you, sir. We look forward to seeing you.”

I sat in a daze for several minutes. I suppose I should have felt anger, but that would not come, not yet. There was only a cold hole in my chest.

I heard muffled voices from outside the office, saw people moving about. Time slowed down
and unreality took possession of the room. The front page of the
Times
stared up at me from my desk; Prince Edward and Sophie Rhys-Jones’ wedding, police clashing with protesters in London at an anti-capitalism demonstration, concerns about the Millennium Dome.

I looked at my hands. They were trembling and
I had the sensation that they did not belong to me.

One of the serpents had taken a
large bite from Yggdrasil’s root.

“Do you want another beer? Or are you going to sit on that barstool all night taking up valuable space while I bleed cash?”

“Yes, give me another beer, Ian.”

“Thank Christ for that. Maybe now I’ll be able to afford something to eat this week.”

He pulled me a pint, muttering to himself.
“That will be a thousand pounds, please.”

“Yeah, right. If you want to charge those sort of prices you better start serving your beer in clean glasses.”

The Bell was empty apart from Ian, myself and a couple of old codgers in the corner reminiscing about their salad days. It was early evening. Katie was at home revising while listening to some horrible drone that passed for music, and Claire was working late. Something to do with the Kettering project. Or so she said.

“You’ve never been married, Ian, have you?”

“Nope.”

“And I’m assuming you’re not a closet gay?”

He narrowed his eyes. “Are you looking to get yourself barred?”

“So the question is: why would a man not want to get married?”

Ian sniffed and wiped some spilled beer with a bar towel.

“That’s not the question,” he replied. “The question is: why the fuck would any man in his right mind want to get married? To save
on all that divorce crap, why not just find a woman you don’t like and give her your house?”

“You bloody cynic, Ian. There
are
happily married couples, you know.”

“Well, I don’t know any,” he said.  “Do
you?”

That weekend I did something I thought I’d never do. I read Claire’s diary.

She had kept one for years, going back to before we’d met.
There must have been a couple of dozen volumes at least, stacked under my old saxophone case in the wardrobe. I’d never been tempted to read her diary before. Why would I have been? Hadn’t we always been happy? Hadn’t we always shared all our experiences and thoughts with each other?

At least I thought we had.

But now all my certainties were mired in doubt.

I waited until Claire was out shopping and Katie was out doing whatever it is teenagers do when they’re not with their parents. Sitting on our bed
, feeling like a burglar, I flicked through the pages.

Most of it was mundane stuff, but an entry in
November of last year caught my eye.

Remember this day, the twenty-eighth of November 1998. This was the day my life started again.

I tried to think where I was on that day. And then it came to me. I was in Derby, visiting my great aunt at her retirement home. I knew this because it was her birthday. Claire couldn’t come because of business commitments. She and Jack had a meeting about the Kettering project. Did anything else happen on that day between Claire and me? No, it didn’t.

This was the day my life started again.

I felt a tightening across my chest and a wave of nausea.

What could there be that Claire couldn’t write down in her diary, that required this obscurity, this note to herself where the event would be remembered but the date may not? What else but
that?
What
happened?
The silence between the words screamed at me.

I read on, noting that from there the references to me became less
while the dates and times relating to Jack Irving grew more numerous. Even the most trivial items were recorded: the day he bought a new suit, a call from him while he was in Portugal with Eleanor, coffee together in a motorway service area, the date of his anniversary in March (against the margin of which was scribbled
, Yuh!
).

After March there were
only a few entries. They restarted on the fourteenth of April in a desultory fashion, then stopped altogether at the beginning of May. She hadn’t written a word since.

Why had she
stopped writing after all those years? Had she realised how often she was making references to Jack and thought it safer to stop? Could she no longer bear to fill the pages with trivia, given the nontrivial nature of a secret life?

I put the diary down and rubbed my hand across my eyes.

We were happy once. Was it so long ago? I needed to remind myself that we were happy, that there was a real life before this one.

I went to the wardrobe and pulled out an earlier diary from 1995. The tone was glad, gushing. There, in her neat hand, were the details of our love-making, passages of longing when I was away on business trips. Sadness when we quarrelled. Joy when we made up. The thousand particulars of Katie’s achievements and tribulations. Gossip and humour. The sacred and the profane. This was the writing of a woman who was content, who had peace of mind, who had no need to conceal anything from her husband or from the world.

I put the diaries back where I’d found them and opened the bedroom window to take in some fresh air. The fluttering in my stomach subsided a little.

Should I confront her?

And if so, with what?

What did her diaries
say
after all? That her life had restarted on a day when I wasn’t around – whatever that meant. That she’d met Jack on a number of occasions.

So what?

And so what if she’s stopped keeping a diary?

Perhaps my inferences were nothing more than those of an unreasonable, untrusting husband.
Perhaps the anonymous phone calls and letters had poisoned my mind. Perhaps there was another explanation for the hotel booking in London.

I forced myself to calm down.

I needed proof of infidelity. Real proof.

And for that I would need the services of a detective.

At the top end of London Road, as it approaches Victoria Park, there are a number of solicitors’ offices, cluster
ed together for mutual comfort. There are also two private investigator firms in this area, one of which, Cumberbatch Surveillance Limited, describes itself with pride as the ‘Number One Infidelity Investigator’.

I parked my car in a nearby side road
, walked the short distance to their rather run-down office, and made it inside just as the rain started.

A scrawny girl with too many piercings, eccentric makeup and spiky purple hair sat behind a reception desk
, tapping her black fingernails on the desk phone in time to the heavy metal music playing through her headset. An old couch, a dusty photocopier and a calendar on the wall were the only other things in the room.

As I entered and closed the ill-fitting door behind me, she removed one of her earphones
with reluctance and said, “Yeah?”

“This is
Cumberbatch Surveillance?”

“Yeah. Do you have an appointment?”

“Whoever he is, he doesn’t need an appointment, Dolores,” came a voice from a side-room. “We need the business, for Christ’s sake. And turn that music down. I can hear it from here.”