‘It was believed to contain the sum of human knowledge.’
Cooper nodded. ‘The answers to everything; the answers to questions no one had yet dreamed of asking and wouldn’t for centuries.’
‘It burned down. The knowledge was lost.’
‘And yet men with great minds through history believed it was there to be lost. That’s the crucial point. From Copernicus to Galileo, from Bacon to Newton, they believed. And they were rational men. And how would that knowledge have been accrued? Who would have compiled the information and assembled it there?’
‘A blueprint for civilization, handed to us by benevolent visitors from another galaxy?’
Cooper smiled. ‘I could hardly have put it better myself,’ he said.
The ego stroking had been done. It was time to take a risk. Lucy drew in a breath. ‘Jane Chambers believes the New Hope settlement vanished because of plague.’
Cooper shrugged. His eyes betrayed nothing.
‘What do you think of that theory?’
‘I think that she’s entitled to it. I also strongly suspect that the forthcoming expedition findings will prove her spectacularly wrong.’
‘Have you discussed it with her?’
‘No.’
‘But you do know her?’
Cooper smiled a tight smile. He reached forward from where he sat to the low table between then and switched off the voice recorder. He said, ‘You mean do I know Jane Chambers in the biblical sense? The fact that you ask the question suggests you’re aware of the answer already.’
‘It’s something you don’t wish to talk about?’
‘It’s a subject I can’t talk about, Ms Church. It would be at best discourteous and at worst a betrayal. We had a brief relationship. It ended badly. What the tabloids subsequently printed was pretty much a web of lies it would’ve made things even worse to try to disentangle by telling the truth. All of that’s off the record, by the way. I can’t and won’t talk about this stuff, though I do respect the journalistic imperative that compelled you to ask.’
Was he being sarcastic? She really could not tell. She decided to ask him about his own theory about the New Hope Island disappearance. It was safe ground and of more interest to most of her readers than her subject’s patchy love life. She switched the machine back on. He smiled at her. She was reminded of what Jane Chambers had said, about her being fundamentally a seeker after truth, under the fripperies of her fast car and designer wardrobe. She wondered had the man she faced at that moment, the same basic integrity.
‘Why did aliens abduct the settlers of New Hope Island?’
Cooper didn’t answer her for a long time. Then he said, ‘Perhaps Jane’s right and they were afflicted with disease. And that disease was incurable with only the primitive medical resources available then to earth. Perhaps they were taken away to be cured. Salvation was their objective in the New Hope Island community. It’s possible the aliens saved them, but in a manner they hadn’t expected.’
‘You don’t for a minute believe that.’
‘No. I don’t. I think the community was healthy and structured and prosperous. They were pious and industrious and sane.’
‘Then why were they taken?’
‘I suspect because they could be, without witnesses, without undue repercussions or fuss.’
‘But to what purpose, Karl?’
‘I don’t know. I could float a couple of theories Lucy, but I honestly don’t know. It’s exactly what I’m going to the Hebrides to try to discover and I won’t rest once I get there until I’ve succeeded in doing so.’
It was Lucy’s turn to nod her head. He sounded a great deal more sincere outlining his expeditionary ambitions than he did mouthing platitudes about his jilted lover. I don’t like him, she thought, with a jolt of disillusionment. He’s dishonest and has far too much self regard. She thought that in person, she could conceal her dislike. But she thought it might be a more difficult thing altogether to hide in print.
Chapter Five
Jane Chambers drove the 60 miles to her daughter’s boarding school pretty much dreading the confrontation to come. There was no avoiding it, though. She was going to the Hebrides and that was that. Edith would have to stay with her father for the summer.
She wouldn’t like it, she might even claim to hate it, but as a single mother Jane had a living to earn and the research funding at the hospital grew more precarious with each round of NHS budget cuts. Virology wasn’t exempt from the economies being made in every department. Her public profile was important in helping to sustain her stature in medicine. The hospital liked the prestige the publicity brought with it.
The day had started badly. She had opened the newspaper in Costa over her habitual flat white and seen the splash on Karl Cooper with the picture by-line above it of the smiling Lucy Church. She consigned it to a rubbish bin without further study. She knew all she ever wanted to know about Karl Cooper.
She had failed in her relationships with men. That was the brutal truth of the matter. She hadn’t brought enough to the party. Neither was she a very good mother, she didn’t think. On the day their divorce had been finalised, Edith’s father had sent her a text message saying that she lacked the gift for intimacy most people who commit to marriage seem naturally to possess. She thought when she considered this, that it was a harsh judgement but probably also true.
Her first appointment at the school was not with Edith but with the pastoral carer, Mrs Sullivan, who wanted to raise a matter she had claimed was too delicate and confidential for discussion over the phone.
Jane didn’t think it worth speculating on the nature of whatever it was her daughter had done to earn Mrs Sullivan’s attentions. The woman herself was a bit of a jobs-worth with a manner that had always seemed to Jane both pompous and condescending. The refusal to disclose details over the phone was entirely characteristic. Edith was a good girl, moral and rather serious and not given to delinquency. At least, that was how she had been a few weeks ago at Easter, when her mother had last had her at home.
She was shown into Mrs Sullivan’s office after only a short wait. She was aware of heavy furniture, a tall arched window, the smell of freshly cut flowers and carpet pile deep under the soles of her sensible shoes. She was invited to sit on a leather Chesterfield under a portrait of the school’s proto-feminist founder. Mrs Sullivan, tall and slender, was more glamorous but even more grave, if possible, than she remembered.
In a brief preamble, Jane declined tea, coffee and water and allowed that the current spell of good weather was indeed very agreeable. There followed a moment of silence. Footsteps carried on the parquet in the corridor outside, their progress along it sounding suitably urgent. The school encouraged an air of purposeful industry.
‘I want to talk to you about your daughter’s musical gift.’
‘Edith doesn’t possess a gift for music, Mrs Sullivan. She is 14. If she did, it would’ve manifested itself before now.’
‘Perhaps she’s a late developer.’
‘On the contrary, she’s always been a rather precocious child. But she’s never shown an interest in music.’
‘Until now, that is.’
Jane frowned. She had an ominous feeling. It had raised goose bumps on the flesh of her arms, under her tailored suit, despite the warmth of the sun bathing the room through its tall west-facing window. She said, ‘I think that you had better explain.’
Mrs Sullivan looked no more comfortable about this than Jane suddenly felt. She was pale and when she tried to smile her mouth merely twitched. She said, ‘It began, Edith says, with a dream. Are you familiar with a folk song called The Recruited Collier?’
‘No.’
‘You do not listen to folk music?’
Jane shrugged. ‘Not really, maybe a bit of Laura Marling.’
‘The song was written in the eighteenth century. It was included in a collection of Cumbrian ballads compiled and then published in 1808. In recent years it has been recor
ded in versions by Anna Briggs in the 1960s and latterly by Kate Rusby. The Rusby version is the first track on an album of the singer’s favourite songs, entitled 10 and released in 2002.’
‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Jane said. ‘Why are you telling me this stuff?’
‘You’ve never heard the song?’
‘I’ve vaguely heard of Kate Rusby. I’ve never owned or played any of her music. I’ve never heard of Anna Briggs and I can assure you, I’ve never in my life heard The Recruited Collier.’
‘Edith first performed the tune a little under a week ago. We encourage the children to improvise their own entertainment. It keeps them away from computer screens and games consoles.’
Jane knew this. It was one of the reasons she had chosen to send her daughter there. The goose bumps were still prickling at the lining of her suit coat sleeves. The ominous feeling in her stomach was churning now, like dread. She said, ‘How do you mean, she performed it?’
‘She played it on a penny whistle. She played it not only note perfectly, but with the panache of a virtuoso. Our music teacher, Mr Clayton witnessed the moment. He was moved to ask where Edith had learned the tune. She said that a man had taught it to her in a dream.’
‘Go on.’
‘Mr Clayton recognised the song. He asked Edith did she know the words. She led him to the music room and sat at the piano and she sang and played it for him there. Her pitch was perfect and the playing accomplished. It was the dialect she sang in that unnerved him.’
‘Even more than the way she claimed to have learned the song?’
‘He said if you closed your eyes, you were listening to an accent unheard in England for at least a hundred years.’
‘So he’s a linguist, on top of being a music teacher.’
‘I’m only repeating what he said.’
‘My daughter cannot play the piano.’
‘I’ll accept that she could not. She can now.’
‘I don’t know what to say,’ Jane said. ‘Except that I’d like to see Edith, right away.’
‘Of course,’ Mrs Sullivan said. She looked directly at Jane, making Jane realise that it was the first time she had really done so since the moment she had entered the room. Then she said, ‘I’d consider it an act of kindness if we could speak again when you have talked to her.’
There was something about working for Alexander McIntyre that sometimes left Patrick Lassiter feeling slightly grubby. He did not feel his professional integrity compromised by the first class return rail ticket from London to Liverpool. He felt that his expertise earned him the comfort of his seat and whatever refreshment he chose to select from the snack trolley. Just as he felt he deserved his room at Liverpool’s five-star Adelphi Hotel for the duration of his stay
The Ballantyne artefacts he was curious to see were housed at the Liverpool Maritime Museum. They were not on public display though and they never had been. Lassiter’s first attempts to get to see and examine them had been coldly rebuffed. It was not in the interest of the museum to foster publicity for the New Hope Island expedition, it was explained. To co-operate with a project so blatantly sensationalist would undermine the academic credentials of the museum and the authority and morale of its staff would subsequently be bound to suffer.
Then something changed. Lassiter never learned the specifics. McIntyre casually mentioned that he would have one of the people who ran his charitable foundation call the person responsible for raising and sustaining the museum’s public funding. This was an institution vulnerable, in the current economic climate. It had lost its central and local government support. It had seen its lottery grant substantially reduced.
All he knew was that the attitude of the people responsible for the museum’s archive suddenly shifted. They became cooperative where they had been obstructive and cordial where there had previously been only disdain. And Lassiter felt in some subtle way that he had been tainted, guilty by association, a party to a procedure that was less than wholly honourable.
The museum was sited on a stretch of still-cobbled street behind where the wharves of the West Dock had once been. It was a quiet location. You would not happen upon the building without knowing it was there. He fancied he could smell the sludge of the Mersey on a light summer breeze and gulls wheeled crying a few feet above his head. He noticed that there was no traffic noise.
He was ten minutes early for his 11.15 appointment. During those ten minutes, as he stood in a high vestibule lined with oiled wood and waited for the time to tick by on a handsome Victorian clock, excitement mounted in him at what he might yet discover there.
He kept an open mind about the mystery of New Hope Island. He believed that the Shanks footage was authentic and could not explain it in rational terms. And he had told McIntyre the truth in saying that watching it had scared him pretty badly.
He did not know what to make of his own accident prone existence when harbouring the Shanks film can in his flat. He just knew that it had stopped, as abruptly as it had started, since he had quarantined the container in a safe deposit box at a storage facility, rented with McIntyre’s money in Wimbledon, a dozen distant miles from where he lived in Waterloo.
He went over in his mind what he knew about the cache of belongings held by the museum in a sea chest that had once been owned by Seamus Ballantyne. The chest and its contents had been donated by his estranged wife. Her name had been Rebecca and her maiden name Browning prior to her marriage to the slave ship master.
She had been strong willed, much more independent than was common among even women of her privileged class in her day in provincial England. She had set fashions. In later life, she had campaigned for the education of girls. Her radicalism had not extended, though, to the emancipation of slaves.
Lassiter thought that she must have been a cruel woman. But that was what the historians called revisionism, wasn’t it? Rebecca Browning wouldn’t have seen the conditions aboard her husband’s ship. She wouldn’t have seen the corpses freed of their manacles to be thrown over the side in the morning when the first mate inventoried the body count in the stinking hold from the night before.
She had been thirty when her husband’s epiphany arrived and totally resolute in rejecting his new faith and his makeshift ministry on the cobbles of Liverpool harbour. She could hardly really be blamed for that. Marriage was a contract in those days and the New Hope adventure was not something really covered by the vows she took at the altar. Perhaps she had been a religious woman. If she had been, his conversion would simply have been heresy to her.
From her perspective, Seamus must have become a stranger overnight, in the grip of a religious zeal that must have seemed obsessive. Maybe she simply thought he had lost his mind. That happened a lot in those days to men who spent their lives at sea.
His speculations were interrupted by the arrival of the individual he was there to meet. Professor Fortescue was the museum’s Keeper of Artefacts. It sounded an ominous and even slightly sinister sort of job. Everything the man handled had belonged to someone long perished. And Fortescue, slender and bespectacled, looked a good decade too young to be the occupant of such a portentous role.
He also looked distinctly nervous. He had before him what Lassiter assumed was a sort of manifest. It was a document curled and yellowed with age and written freehand by someone with perfect copperplate. It was torn in tiny fissures at its edges and obviously stiff. He might have been nervous about this document incurring damage in the ambient humidity and overhead light. But observing his discomfort, Lassiter thought there was likely rather more to it than that.
Fortescue cleared his throat. ‘Are you familiar, Mr Lassiter, with how common superstition is in regard to the subject of the sea? I mean with the prevalence and sheer persistence of some of those superstitions?’
His phraseology was pompous. But he was local, from a local family, which was to Lassiter’s advantage in helping provide context.
‘I am, Professor Fortescue, though obviou
sly I’m not the authority you are on the subject. Can I ask why it is that you bring it up?’
Fortescue wore glasses. They had gold frames. The frames glittered in the sunshine coming through the high windows of the vestibule. He put down the manifest on a large marble topped table bearing a single flower vase over in the corner. He played with and then removed his glasses. Then he polished their lenses on his tie and put them on again. It was an old-fashioned gesture for so young a man and one dictated, Lassiter thought, totally by nerves. The lenses of his glasses had not been smeared.
He raised his head and gave his visitor a frank look. He said, ‘I know that you used to be a police detective. No one gains access to our private collection without screening.’
‘I see.’
‘It’s a formality. Some of the objects we house are very valuable. Our insurers insist. A questionnaire was filled in by Mr McIntyre’s people on your behalf.’
‘Fair enough,’ Lassiter said. ‘What’s your point?’
‘You’ll probably scoff at what I have to say.’
‘Try me.’
Fortescue glanced across at his manifest, as though it might have fluttered off somewhere, or was about to. It lay where he had left it. ‘The sea chest belonging to Ballantyne came into our possession when the Maritime Museum was founded in the 1880s. Prior to that time, it was in the possession of the Browning family. Since that time, it has gained a reputation for bad luck.’
‘I thought that the contents had never been publicly displayed.’
‘They haven’t, they’ve been the subject of study on two occasions. The first was a few years after the conclusion of the Great War. A man called David Shanks asked to see the contents of the chest. He was a distinguished former soldier and something of a writer in the Orwell mode.’
‘Yes,’ Lassiter said. ‘I’ve heard of him.’
‘He stole something.’
‘He did what?’
‘The theft wasn’t discovered.’
‘Careless.’
Fortescue tried to smile. The smile was unsuccessful. He had become too pale to smile heartily. ‘Shanks returned the stolen object, by post, in the autumn of 1937. He wrote both an apology and a warning to others about the item he’d returned.’
The Colony Trilogy Page 6