Les Arbres

What it is

A big house in the middle of France, in the country the pages locate by Angevin and Poitiers. River reaches it by train from Paris to Poitiers and then by bus to Angevin, on the river Anglin; the house itself is a walk out of town, walled off, in woods, and the café customer who gives him the name says that finding it is “yes and no”.

By the time River gets there it is a burned shell. The fire was three nights earlier and deliberate; the house is empty; no bodies have been recovered; tyre tracks and melted white goods sit in the mud. Everything the place might have told an investigator is ash, which is what the narrator says and what the plot then has to work around.

What it was in 1990 is given by the people who were there. A commune of eighteen or twenty men — Russian, English, German and Czech — run by an American everyone obeyed, with six or seven boys raised on the premises and taught by a Frenchman called Jean. Bad Sam Chapman remembers eight male adults, first names only, a regimented house, few women and some children, and an ex-KGB officer calling himself Yevgeny. There were fields round the house where the boys learned to shoot, and a cellar where each of them was locked in on his twelfth birthday until he asked to be let out.

Book 4 — Spook Street

• C05 — Named by the café customer as the place the dead lookalike came from, and reached at dusk: arson three nights earlier, no bodies, tyre tracks and melted white goods. River accepts that any evidence is ash, and is shot at from the trees on the way out.
• C06 — Victor, the man with the shotgun, says the people are all gone and that the fire was deliberate — it started the same afternoon the cars left towards Poitiers. He puts the community at eighteen or twenty men who had been there twenty-three or twenty-four years, children among them once, and thinks they were probably communists.
• C07 — Natasha Reverde’s account of 1990: Russian, English, German and Czech men, an American called Frank whom everyone obeyed, boys raised without school, and her own ejection from the property when she came back.
• C08 — Named as the place Patrice learned to shoot, in the fields round the house.
• C09 — Sam Chapman describes his two visits as Cartwright’s junior Dog: the regimented house, the eight men, the debriefings of an agent codenamed Henry, and the drunk old man saying twice that he wished he had never heard of Project Cuckoo.
• C12 — Frank Harkness confirms he ran the place, that Bertrand was his son, and that River is; he does not deny burning it.
• C13 — The cellar again, with terms: Bertrand seventeen days, Patrice a month, Yves two months. Patrice assumes afterwards that Les Arbres can be rebuilt and the others will return.
• C14 — Frank describes Les Arbres as the operation he was running, and invites River to join what began there.
• C15 — Claude Whelan concedes that the commune was originally funded and resourced by the Service: Harkness’s training operation, resourced through the Service and never owned by it.

Why it matters

Les Arbres is where Spook Street puts its origin story, and it puts it in France so that the Service can deny it. A walled house, a handful of men with first names only, a school with no register and no curriculum beyond a language and a weapon: the place is the physical form of deniability. Everything the book later finds in London — the cold bodies, the cellar discipline, the boy who believed his own cover — was manufactured here, in a building with no official existence.

It is also the book’s most efficient piece of plotting. River arrives three nights late, so the exposition has to come from people rather than documents: a hunter, a woman who was thrown off the property, an ageing Dog who stayed in a hotel in Angevin. Each witness supplies a different Les Arbres — Victor’s is a rumour, Natasha’s is a memory of 1990, Chapman’s is a posting — and none of them can say what it became.

The cellar is the image the book keeps. A twelve-year-old locked in the dark until he asks to be released is a compact description of the whole Cuckoo method: obedience dressed as endurance, and a boy taught that survival is a thing he can be granted. The terms — seventeen days, a month, two months — are the book’s only measure of its antagonists as children, and the longest belongs to the one who bombed a shopping centre.

Open questions

• Who gave the order to burn it. Frank does not deny River’s accusation, and the timing — the same afternoon the cars left — suggests a planned dispersal rather than a fire that followed one. Inference: the pages never state it outright.
• Where the eighteen or twenty men went, and how many of them are still at large when Frank slips his escort in the final chapter.
• What the ex-agent codenamed Henry actually was, and whether the debriefings were cover for the travel Cartwright was really making.
• Whether the Service’s funding is documented anywhere outside Whelan’s unofficial account — the book’s point is that it is not.
• What happened to the boys who were not Bertrand, Patrice or Yves; Patrice expects them back, and the book does not say he is wrong.