Left You Dead

46

The line of twenty-odd volunteers of the Sussex Community Search Team, wearing orange-and-yellow high-viz tabards over their summer rambling gear, were stretched out to the right and left of Rodney Allbright. The majority, like himself, were well past retirement age, which gave them the freedom to be called out at a moment’s notice. Each had a whistle hung from a cord around their neck.

Oh yes, such fun, and with such valuable purpose, Allbright thought, as he strode in his trusty hiking boots through the wet undergrowth. He loved these callouts, which happened every few weeks.

Ever since his retirement, over ten years ago now, from the Brighton firm of chartered accountants, Hartley Fowler, where he had spent his entire working life, he now had a new purpose as a member of the Sussex Community Search Team. A purpose he had badly needed after his wife, Maureen, with whom he’d planned so many things to enjoy in his retirement, had suddenly passed away from a massive stroke five years ago.

Along with his fellow volunteers, supervised by two Sussex police officers, he had great satisfaction in being part of a team that was readily willing to do anything, from trying to find a runaway child or a sufferer from dementia who had wandered from his or her home and not been seen by a distraught spouse for several days, to — like now — searching for the remains of a woman who was, according to the briefing, missing, presumed murdered.

So far, in four years of being a member of this team, he himself had not found anything. It had always been another member, somewhere along the long line that stretched out either side of him, who had stumbled across an item of clothing or a rucksack concealed in the undergrowth or what looked like a shallow grave or, on one occasion, a frightened missing child halfway up a tree.

He glanced at his watch: 4.32 p.m. Sunset today was around 7.30 p.m. They had about three hours before the light failed sufficiently for the search to be abandoned for the night, to be resumed in the morning. Somewhere in the distance he heard the sound of two dogs barking.

He strode on, maintaining the prescribed gap between himself and his colleagues on either side, passing a variety of trees on this damp September afternoon. Beneath the peak of his golfing cap, his eyes were focused on the dense undergrowth of mostly heather and bracken, looking for any sign at all of something other than the natural flora and fauna of the forest.

He had always loved trees and there were numerous fine specimens here of sweet chestnut, hazel, alder, silver birch and Scots pine. Trees had always been of particular interest to him and to Maureen. Their longevity had fascinated both of them. He was passing some now that had been around a century and more before he had been born, and would, unless they were coppiced, doubtless be around for further centuries long after he’d gone.

He and Maureen had planned several of their rambling holidays around sites of ancient yew trees. The year before she died, they had visited the fabled Fortingall Yew in Perthshire, Scotland. It was estimated to be over 2,000 years old and some people reckoned it might be as old as 3,000 years, way preceding the birth of Christ. A couple of years earlier, they had visited an even more ancient specimen in Defynnog in Wales, which some experts dated at over 5,000 years old.

Yews held a particular fascination for him. Historically, in the past millennium, they tended to be planted in churchyards, because their leaves were poisonous to cattle and churches were the only gardens protected by walls or rails. And they were planted for a reason — they were the best wood for making longbows, the standard weapon for British soldiers in the centuries before firearms had made them redundant.

Maureen had often urged him to apply for the quiz show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? because, she ribbed him, he was a mine of useless information, much of it involving trees.

But there was something else about these majestic structures. He wasn’t a fanciful person, but like all humans with enquiring minds, he was puzzled by aspects of life. The same questions so many asked. What happened before we were born? What will happen after we die? Why are we here?

Rodney Allbright wasn’t a man with a whimsical imagination, yet sometimes, when he walked past a particularly magnificent specimen, like the massively thick and tall chestnut he was passing now, he did wonder whether trees had an intelligence which we humans were oblivious to. Trees just existed. They didn’t need education, they didn’t need to cover their surroundings in tarmac so they could move around, they didn’t need to build structures to live in or burn fossil fuels to stay warm. They didn’t need electricity or to buy stuff wrapped in layers of packaging or a million other pollutants that messed with the ecology of the planet. Trees just — were. Tall, serene, smart? Giving back to Mother Nature nothing more and nothing less than they took from her.

One of the last things his beloved Maureen had said to him before her stroke was, ‘You know, my love, sometimes I wish I’d just been born as a tree.’

A flash of colour snapped him out of his reveries.

He stopped in his tracks. Had he imagined it?

The rest of the search line team carried on. He turned back and probed the bracken with his stick. Bloody hell. No, he hadn’t imagined it.

A woman’s blue-and-white trainer lay on its side at the edge of what looked like a recently dug area.

He reached for his whistle and blew it.

And as he did so, something else caught his eye. A glint of light in some brambles a short distance away. A shard of broken glass?