The hollow tree, p.1
The Hollow Tree, page 1
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
The Goldenacre
Copyright © 2024 Philip Miller
All rights reserved.
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, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Published by
Soho Press, Inc.
227 W 17th Street
New York, NY 10011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Miller, Philip, author.
Title: The hollow tree / Philip Miller.
Description: New York, NY : Soho Crime, 2024. | Series: A Shona Sandison investigation ; 2
Identifiers: LCCN 2023029775
ISBN 978-1-64129-558-1
eISBN 978-1-64129-559-8
Subjects: LCSH: Journalists—Fiction. | Murder—Investigation—Fiction. | LCGFT: Detective and mystery fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PR6113.I567 H65 2024 | DDC 823/.92—dc23/eng/20230703
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023029775
Interior design by Janine Agro
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Samantha and Thomasin
In deope dalum deora ungerim
In the deep dale live many wild beasts
(“Durham,” Anglo-Saxon)
hello
Shona Sandison was going to a wedding. The day would end in death.
She stood on the deck of the ferry, leaning against the metal barrier between her and the tilting sea, which stretched grey as ash to a white horizon. The world seemed huge and unfathomable, and she felt small and damaged, and unsuited to what it offered, and challenged.
She was not alone. An old colleague and friend was beside her, shouting into the implacable Scottish wind. Shona looked down at her shoes, wet on the painted metal deck. Her stick was held tight in her left hand.
“Fact is, Shona, I think they’re just bored of democracy, these people. They don’t care for it,” Hector Stricken bellowed. “A wee touch of fascism appeals to them. Look at them, propping up this fucking government. Seems to me, some of them prefer to be collaborators, not investigators. Cheerleaders, drunk on their access to power. They should be ashamed of themselves.”
His angry monologue had begun on the train from Glasgow to the port of Gourock. Stricken, still hanging on as an undervalued and underpaid reporter at the Edinburgh Post, had then raged at the front pages of the national newspapers at the ferry port’s newsagent. He had picked out and bought several papers, just so he could stride across the platform to a waste basket, and bin them dramatically.
“Give it a rest,” Shona said. “Not all of them, and not all of us. Calm the fuck down.”
Hector went on. Shona listened, or heard. She watched the neat rows of white houses on the headland drift past like a line of teeth. “They’re not interested in committees, reports, policy reviews, the granular workings of a rigorous democratic system. It bores them. That’s why there’s no council reporters anymore. No court reporters. No specialist reporters. No local government reporters.”
“Really, Hec—you sound like my dad. The old Communist digging in his allotment. I need a coffee.”
“Does he still have that allotment? Good on him. Yeah, the problem is, that fear, that angry nostalgia, the appeal to a mythic past, is far more attractive and easier to package than probity, reserve, compassion, moderation, compromise, subtlety,” Stricken said.
Shona nodded slowly. Not only had she heard this before, she had thought it before. Her body rocked gently as the ferry moved, slowly and massively into the cold grey waters of the Firth of Clyde.
“Nuance!” he yelled.
His bellow sunk into the air and was lost.
“Jesus Christ. Give over, man,” Shona said, as firmly as she could without shouting. “It might be rotten politics but, whether you like it or not, it’s good business. For those papers.”
“It’s a bad business,” Hector mumbled. “It’s the ruin of democracy.”
“Och, wheesht. I know some good reporters in those papers. And the papers you binned are at least selling—more than can be said for yours.”
The ferry chugged into a thick mist. It was as if they had entered an erasure. The form and volume of the hills and the sea had been rubbed out by dreary light. The distant deep hulks of mountains were smudged and edgeless. The sky was as solid as the water below—grey, lightless, unmoving.
It was cold. Winter was dying hard. It had spent its spite and drowned the land in volumes of darkness, but spring had not yet emerged. It was as if the seasons were considering whether to continue their cycle. It was as if the seasons had paused.
“I tell you, though, it’s not going to end well,” Stricken said. “I think the whole country is fucked.”
“Come on, Hector—wasn’t it always fucked?” Shona said, turning to him. “I seem to remember everything being fucked. All the time. It’s just sometimes the things that are fucked are hidden or ignored. Then we all find the hidden fucked things and are astonished—wow, isn’t this thing fucked too? Let’s add that fucking misery to the Fucked Pile. Which gets higher and higher, until it falls on fucking top of us, and then we are all well and truly fucked.”
“Well, if you put it that way,” Hector said, smiling.
“Contentment is about how much you are prepared to ignore,” she said.
“Brief period, wasn’t there,” he said, quieter, “mebbe in the 1990s? When it seemed to me that things were on their way to being un-fucked. When we were all a wee bit younger. Then it was all fucked again. I think this state as a serious concern is over. No one reads the news. No one cares about anything—just shopping, sport, and celebrities.”
“You’re a miserable old git, Hector,” she said. “I was wearing a school uniform in the 1990s. I don’t remember too much light and hope and joy then.”
Her fingers were freezing. Her ears were wet with sea fog. As if pushed by an invisible hand, her walking stick fell to the deck, splashing in a small puddle on the green metal. “Fuck’s sake.”
Stricken bent and picked it up, and handed it to her. “Anyway, enough about you, Reporter of the Year—how do I look?” he said, suddenly smiling, extending his arms. Despite his sudden humour, he looked miserable: his long nose was red, his cheeks smarting. Under his red anorak, he was wearing a new suit: dark blue, with thin white stripes, and a vivid blue, shiny tie. A white shirt dug into his pale neck. Bobbles of cold rain gathered on his plastic shoulders.
Shona smiled. “You look like the Antichrist.”
He shook his head, and turned, leaned against the barrier and looked out over the sea.
“You buy that thing?” she said, pointing at his suit.
“No, rental. From that place on George Street.”
“I thought you’d go for a kilt,” she said.
“I don’t like my legs,” he muttered. “I don’t want them on display. Look, Shona—how can a man wearing a suit as fine as this look like the Antichrist?”
“You telling me Satan doesn’t wear a fucking suit?” she said. He laughed.
Shona stared into the waves, which slapped against the sides of the boat.
“When you’re on a ferry, do you ever look over the side and wonder what it would be like to jump?” she said. She imagined standing on the railing, her weight tipping forward, her stick spinning in the wind, her head tumbling to the sea. The sky and sea revolving about her eyes.
“What? No, Shona. I don’t—do you?” he said.
“No. Never,” she said. She peeked over the rail, down to the deck below. It would not be a clean fall to the water. There would be metal in the way, and breakage—rupturing, blood and splintering.
She shivered.
“Aye, it’s dreich,” Stricken said, noticing her quivering, raising his voice over the churning engines. The boat was rocking almost imperceptibly from side to side. Enough to unsteady them.
“Who in the name of fuck gets married in winter?” Shona said, pulling her hat over her ears.
“It’s spring, actually.”
“Get fucked, it’s winter,” she said. “I hate this time of year. Everything is dead. It’s all chores, and dread. White skies and fog. Why is Viv getting married now?”
“I dunno, Shona—because people are optimistic? It’s spring, it’s a time of renewal, of green shoots, of . . . you know what I mean. Optimism, anyway,” Stricken ventured, before blowing into his hands. His eyes were watering now, as the ferry to Dunoon picked up pace, cutting stolidly through the waves.
Shona felt the increase of the barrelling weight of the vessel beneath her feet. The sea was opening, the firth widening between the arms of grey land. The white cloud cover gently split, and the sun emerged, glowing dully. The long low waves were now gently gilded. The metal railings glistened, the deck, the flagpoles.
They were going to a wedding. Vivienne Banks and Wayne Provan were to be married in a country hotel near Dunoon. Viv was both a friend and former colleague of Shona, and of Hector, and of the gathered gaggles of former and current journalists who were huddled upon and below deck. Viv had been the editorial secretary of their paper, the Edinburgh Post, for many years. Wayne worked for the police. Shona had met him in a pub, many months ago. He had seemed dour, unremarkable, like an undrunk cup of cold grey tea.
Viv, bri
The tang and drift of the sea summoned memories. There had been one long, hot day in July when the streets of Edinburgh shimmered and the heather on Arthur’s Seat seemed to fume with the heat. The sky, untouched and fierce and blue. They had skived off work together and headed for the coast. They had waded, socks in hands, in the sea off the beach at Gullane, and lain together on the slowly sinking dunes, drinking from a cold long bottle and wondering how they could ever get back to the city, and if they cared. There were other memories, too. Shona shrugged them away. They were lost and gone. She wondered if Viv remembered them.
For the wedding, Viv had asked Shona to read a poem by the nineteenth-century Scottish magician and poet Ebenezer Mount. Shona had tried to memorise it. The folded words were in her inside pocket. She hoped she could read them without stumbling.
Like hands our fears do tether
and once joined, disappear,
like tears that run together,
pool, and become our mirror.
She thought of Viv’s dullard fiancé and wondered if poetry meant anything to him.
“I’m not sure what she has seen in him,” Shona muttered. A stray thought rose in her mind: she wondered if really Wayne should look a little like herself. But he looked nothing like Shona.
“Who sees what in who?” Stricken said.
“What she sees in that guy.”
“You mean the handsome groom? And do you see anything in anyone?” Stricken said mildly.
“Go on then, tell me more about him,” she said. “Tell me about his hidden shallows.”
“Yeah, I don’t know him much,” Stricken said, and shrugged. “Think he’s in the polis. Seen him a couple of times in the pub with Viv, seemed a pretty confident guy.”
“A knob then.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t trust anyone who actually wants to wear a uniform.”
Stricken shook his head and looked along the deck. He saw someone he knew and waved—they nodded and waved back. “There’s a lot of hacks on this wee boat.”
“I know, just think if we hit a submarine and we go down. Consider the vast loss to Scotland,” Shona said. “To culture.”
Stricken rubbed his eyes.
“So, what’s the plan? We get off this tugboat, get to the hotel, find our rooms, get pissed?” Shona said.
“That’s about it,” Stricken said. “Shall we go inside? I’m done in, and it’s Baltic out here.”
“You are hungover again.”
“Yep, I drink to forget,” he said, running a hand through thinning red hair.
“Forget what?”
He smiled. “I’ve forgotten. See? It worked. Let’s keep it that way.”
They moved down the slippery deck to a heavy metal white door. Hector opened it, and held it as Shona stepped unsteadily inside.
The café was busy with commuters on the short trip from Gourock to Dunoon, and packs of the wedding party, laughing and chatting in groups. Loud music played, the coffee machines screeched, and trays clacked in the canteen.
After some fussing, Hector brought hot drinks and Shona slumped onto a plastic chair fixed to the deck next to a table. He slumped beside her, almost horizontal.
“So,” he said, “how is the freelance life anyway?”
Shona had been a freelancer for six months, working from home, still living with her elderly father in a small flat in the Lochend area of Edinburgh. She had taken a redundancy package from the Edinburgh Post. The money was running out, and her life had become solitary. It gnawed at her. She was missing the newsroom, with its easy chat, its joking and teasing, and its familiar faces. She spent most days on her bed or at her kitchen table, tapping at her laptop, with only an increasingly distracted Hugh Sandison as company—or her new rescue cat, MacDiarmid. Her dad had slowed down recently. He was often forgetful, and tired. He shuffled instead of walked. He kept losing his glasses.
“Fine,” she said, smoothing the froth of her coffee with a finger. “I’ve got the column with the Mercury, and I’m on this retainer with the Buried Lede.”
“How are they?” Hector peered. “It’s an investigation unit, right?”
“Aye. They’re not bad, actually,” she said, shrugging. “They let me get on with it. Ranald is all right—the editor. He set it up. Ranald Zawadzki. He knows how to sell our stuff to the papers.”
“Zawadzki?”
“Yeah—usual spelling,” she said.
Hector smiled. “Ah. The old newsroom jokes are the best.”
She went on: “He’s a bracing guy from Shetland. We work alone or together on things and sell to the highest bidder. The Buried Lede has funding from a couple of nonprofits. Ranald directs it all. He is into looking at dark money, offshore banking, that kind of thing. I do all kinds of stuff for them. Not all of it comes with a byline. There’s a clutch of us on retainer. So, I’m washing my face. But not by much.”
Hector blew out heavily. “Sounds like hard graft. And uncertain. What you working on at the moment?”
Shona was working on nothing much. She’d spent weeks covering the trial of a disgraced Scottish minister. She had filed a column for the Sunday Mercury that morning. That was it. She was out of ideas.
“Oh, bits and pieces,” she said. “Got some long-term things I am working on.”
The ferry suddenly lurched to one side and Stricken swore. Then he sat up, said something about creasing, took off his coat and jacket, and slung them on a chair.
There was a burst of laughter, and Viv Banks and her parents staggered into the canteen, exaggerating, with staggered steps, the lurch of the boat. Viv waved and winked at Stricken and Shona. Her parents, looking nervous and grey, smiled thinly.
A pale man in a suit came over to their low table. He took off his jacket and laid it down on a seat. His large eyes flickered. He had a shaven head, and was holding something in one hand.
“Don’t mind if I leave my stuff here, do you?” he said to Shona. He had a soft northern English accent. His face was open and mild.
Shona said not at all. His jacket was like Stricken’s—blue, with thin white pinstripes.
“Thanks, pet,” he said quietly, and joined Viv and her party. There was a loud cheer as the family joined the other guests. Someone hugged Viv and kissed her on the cheek. Viv beamed and wiped a tear from an eye. The pale man moved to one side, and slipped behind the crowd to the bar, where he ordered a drink.
“Who is that guy?” Shona said, nudging Stricken, who did not reply. She leant over to look at his long face, dusted with freckles and ginger stubble. He was fast asleep.
She finished her coffee, and walked to the windows overlooking the deck and the sea. The town of Dunoon was coming into view, grey and low on the coastline. The clouds had opened further. Emerald blue slashed across the sky. The drone of the ship’s engines below altered their pitch as the ferry approached the harbour.
More peals of laughter rolled from the wedding party. Shona looked around, and for some reason two men were lying beside each other on the floor, flapping like beached fish. People were clapping. Viv was sat with a drink in her hand, a man with his arm around her. Her parents were looking on, smiling. The pale man was at the bar, his sleeves rolled up, looking at the joy and the laughter, and drinking with no expression. He was turning something over in his hand—a pebble or a small ball. He looked drained, barely present.
The public address system burst into life with a shudder and a squeal. The announcer said the entire crew, including the captain, wished the very best to Vivienne Banks and Wayne Provan on their imminent nuptials. People clapped and cheered. Shona grinned.
Her phone rang. It was buzzing around her inside pocket like a small animal. She took it out. The word DAD shouted at her from the screen.
“Hey,” she said. “You all right?”
“Hi, darling,” Hugh Sandison said. He was inside. There was no background noise. His voice was weak.
“What’s up, Dad?”
“I’m not feeling too good, hen,” he said. “I’ve called the doctor. How’s the wedding?”
