McIntyre told Karl Cooper what Lassiter had told him about his Liverpool experience over dinner at his home. He said that he’d sent Lassiter to examine some items that had belonged to Seamus Ballantyne. He said that among those items had been a pocket watch. The watch, when recovered from a locked sea chest, was ticking strongly and showing the correct time. This was despite it having been stored there undisturbed for several years. Lassiter further claimed that the watch had spent better than a decade in the mid-twentieth century in the possession of the crofter David Shanks.
Cooper was recently familiar with the name of Shanks. McIntyre had shown him the film shot on New Hope Island in the 1930s. He hadn’t really said much about it at the time of the showing. He’d grown pale watching it. The footage didn’t make for comfortable viewing. His only comment at the time had been that he thought the film probably genuine. It was too disturbing to be faked.
The meal the two men had just shared had been genuinely convivial. McIntyre enjoyed Cooper’s company as well as his expertise and insights. In some ways he thought of Karl almost as a surrogate son, so close was the conviction they shared about the existence of intelligent life beyond earth’s boundaries. He felt affection as well as admiration for this young man, with his crystalline intellect and unforced charisma. Cooper had prospered despite a modest upbringing. It was an achievement they had in common.
He had uncorked a bottle of brandy, laid down when Napoleon Bonaparte still ruled France and its First Empire, before Cooper chose to comment. It was an extravagant gesture but one McIntyre felt his respect and fondness for his guest justified. Besides, they were on the brink of an historic discovery. He thought of the picture in his school history book of Napoleon in Egypt contemplating the secret of the Sphinx.
They were seated by now on the sun terrace of his house, enjoying the views out over London from the top of Highgate Hill and smoking McIntyre’s cigars as evening embraced the world.
‘And you’re concerned by what you’ve told me?’
‘I am, Karl. Very.’
‘Lassiter’s a drunk. That’s the impression you’ve given me of him.’
‘He’s an alcoholic. There’s a difference. I wouldn’t employ a drunk. He wouldn’t work under the influence. He’s too fastidious for that. And he’s exceptionally good at what he does. I believe the experience he endured in that museum in Liverpool to have been genuine.’
‘All experiences are subject to interpretation.’
‘I know that. I was happy to believe David Shanks brought his apparition with him to New Hope Island. I couldn’t see that black magic or paranormal phenomena of any kind had anything to do with the fate of the original community. I could think of only one plausible explanation for the vanishing.’
‘There is only one plausible explanation,’ Cooper said, reaching to tap ash from the tip of his cigar. ‘We both know that.’
‘Shanks dabbled in magic,’ McIntyre said. ‘At least, there’s compelling circumstantial evidence to suggest he did so and that he later lived to regret it.’
‘Thus the unwelcome subject of his home movie,’ Cooper said, ‘New Hope’s spectral little squatter.’
‘A 200 year old watch, apparently winding and setting itself in a locked chest in a museum basement is a separate matter, however, for which I can think of no explanation which offers any comfort at all.’
‘Swiss precision,’ Cooper said.
McIntyre smiled, despite himself. ‘Very droll,’ he said.
‘You have only Lassiter’s word, about the watch.’
‘Which I’ve just told you, I trust.’
‘He could have made the story up to make his work on your behalf seem more important than it really is.’
‘The experience scared him,’ McIntyre said. ‘He wasn’t trying to impress me in recounting it.’
‘Kinetic energy,’ Cooper said, after a pause. ‘There must have been a tremendous release of kinetic energy when the alien spacecraft landed and its occupants made contact. That could affect something as complex as a watch mechanism. It might generate power in the watch movement for centuries.’
‘Except that the watch never went to New Hope Island,’ McIntyre said. ‘It was left behind in Liverpool in the possession of Rebecca Browning. It’s not a relic of the New Hope community, Karl, but a souvenir of Ballantyne’s seafaring life. All of the stuff in the chest pre-dates the New Hope experience. None of it ever went near the island.’
Cooper was quiet for a moment smoking, contemplating, absorbing this information and its implications. He sipped from his glass. Then he said, ‘Shanks stole the watch, right?’
‘He stole something. The watch had far greater intrinsic value than anything else in the chest. Lassiter quite reasonably concluded it was the artefact stolen.’
‘So for more than a decade, that pocket watch was in the possession of a black magician. Its mechanical mischief, if Lassiter’s to be believed, is more likely than anything to be a consequence of that fact. Like that apparition he captured with his cine-camera, it’s to do with Shanks and his demonic dabbling and not the Island at all. It has nothing to do with the disappearance of the community. It has nothing even to do really with Seamus Ballantyne.’
‘Damn David Shanks,’ McIntyre said. ‘That man didn’t just try to settle on New Hope, Karl. He contaminated the place.’
‘We’re talking about a revenant apparition.’
‘And a delinquent timepiece,’ McIntyre said.
‘For which I keep reminding you, we only have Lassiter’s word. Keep things in proportion. It doesn’t amount to a curse. You have people on the Island, right?’
‘A small security team has been there for a week. An ex-Royal Marine captain by the name of Blake is in charge. One of the chaps with him was awarded the Military Cross during his third tour of duty with the Parachute Regiment in Afghanistan.’
‘Good men then, reliable, presumably vigilant, well-qualified. Have they reported anything out of the ordinary?’
‘They’ve reported nothing whatsoever.’
‘There you are.’
‘There’s a construction crew there too as of this morning,’ McIntyre said, ‘building the living quarters you and the others will occupy. I suppose if New Hope was afflicted by ghostly goings on, someone would have radioed in to comment on it or complain.’
‘But no one has.’
‘Not yet.’
‘There are no ghosts, Alex. There was never anything magical or paranormal there. Not in the time of the settlement. There was no mass suicide induced by mass hysteria. There was no fatal epidemic of disease and the people didn’t embark from the island aboard a fleet of boats for pastures new without leaving a note. They were taken. They were chosen and taken by benign and curious visitors to our world and when I get there I promise you I’ll uncover the proof of that.’
‘And you still believe they left a calling card?’
‘Somewhere on the island, I’m convinced they did,’ Cooper said. ‘And when I find that, you’ll have your world exclusive. And I’ll have my first solid step on the route to establishing formal contact. It’ll be a moment for the world to gather breath.’
‘It’ll put both our names in the history books.’
The two men were poised, about to clink glasses in a toast to that happy thought, when the phone at McIntyre’s elbow rang. He picked up the receiver and listened for a while and then grunted one unintelligible word and replaced it.
‘Trouble?’
‘That was Carrick, the paper’s features editor. One of our team of experts has rendered himself indisposed.’
‘Which?’
‘Simon Hawsley-Smith, the spiritual medium.’
‘No great loss,’ Cooper said.
‘We need to be seen to cover every eventuality, Karl. We need to be authoritative and scrupulous and professional. This is the definitive investigation into perhaps the greatest unsolved mystery of modern times.’
‘So long as you
don’t lose our forensic archaeologist,’ Cooper said. ‘The ground there is going to yield some interesting secrets. He’ll be more than useful. He’s indispensable.’
‘Lassiter knows a psychic,’ McIntyre said.
‘You put too much store in Lassiter, Alex.’
‘She’s genuine, he says, highly gifted, if reluctant.’
‘If she’s genuine then it’s no surprise she’s reluctant,’ Cooper said. ‘A dialogue with the dead can’t be a comfortable encounter.’ He emptied the contents of his glass into his mouth and gulped appreciatively. ‘Think she can be persuaded?’
McIntyre shrugged. ‘Everyone has their price, is my experience. ‘
‘Me included?’
‘You’re the exception that proves the rule, Karl. I’ll call Lassiter in the morning,’ he said.
Lucy Church was getting ready for bed when the call came from Carrick. Features wasn’t hard news and personal disinclination prevented him from doing late nights habitually so she knew that something pretty serious must be up for him still to be working.
‘We’re an expert short,’ he said. ‘Our medium has just suffered a stroke that’s likely to prove fatal. That’s the prognosis, anyway.’
‘You’d have thought he’d have known,’ Lucy said.
‘Very bloody funny, not. He’s an expert in communicating with the other side, not a clairvoyant. He never claimed to be able to see the future.’
‘If he was destined to make it so soon to the other side himself, you’d have thought one of his contacts there would have told him how welcome he was shortly going to be. Wouldn’t you?’
‘Jesus, Lucy. You’re all heart.’
‘So the interview I had planned with him for tomorrow is off, then,’ Lucy said.
‘I should think that’s fairly bloody obvious,’ Carrick said. ‘Why else would I call you up so late at night?’
‘Well, James, I didn’t think it was because I was in trouble for that last piece. All the interesting observations I had to make about Karl Cooper were subbed out of what I wrote. I don’t honestly know why you made me bother. We could’ve just run one of the puff pieces his PR people generate. It would have saved my time and effort and been a great deal better for my journalistic credibility.’ She closed her eyes. A phrase such as that last one was a contradiction in terms to a man like Carrick and she well knew it.
‘You called him a narcissistic womaniser.’
‘I didn’t. I let him condemn himself. He’s boastful and supercilious. I don’t think I’ve met a vainer man.’
‘He’s also a personal friend of our proprietor.’
‘He denied that. So he’s a liar, too.’
‘Really took to him, didn’t you?’
Lucy didn’t reply. Carrick said, ‘If we’d printed the profile you wrote, you’d probably be out of a job. You certainly wouldn’t still be going on the New Hope Island expedition.’
‘Cooper would’ve thrown his toys out of the pram?’
‘Not Cooper, McIntyre. Bigger pram, ergo, bigger toys.’
‘They’re that close?’
‘They are. Like father and son. Don’t know what the common bond is, but something links them. Anyway, you should be thanking me. You’re still onboard.’
‘Any word yet on who’s coming with me?’
‘I am.’
‘You’re kidding, James.’
‘I wouldn’t joke about being dispatched to the Hebrides. Not when I’ve got tickets for the Lords Test and Clapton at the Albert Hall.’
‘When was the last time you actually wrote anything?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Carrick said. ‘The word has come from above. Ours is not to reason why.’
Or write the truth, Lucy thought. She could not remember the last piece she had read under James Carrick’s by-line. He was far more noted these days for sitting on the sofa as a regular guest on breakfast television, dishing out succulent morsels of celebrity gossip. She said, ‘Too early, I suppose, for a replacement medium to have been approached?’
‘Communing with the dead isn’t football, love. You don’t have an array of substitutes warming up on the touchline.’
‘It’ll be someone with a degree of notoriety, though,’ Lucy said.
‘Not necessarily,’ Carrick said. ‘We’ve already got the housewives’ choice in Karl Cooper. We have the only archaeologist in the country who could legitimately claim to be a household name. We have Doctor Eye-Candy, the hit series-fronting virologist.’
‘I was very impressed with Jane Chambers,’ Lucy said. ‘She sounded a damn sight more credible than Cooper, with his little green men.’
‘When are you doing the archaeologist?’
‘Day after tomorrow,’ Lucy said. He was actually a forensic archaeologist and his name was Jesse Kale and he was a burly, bearded Canadian who was a fixture on the History Channel. Lucy had rather gone off him after seeing him front an ad on telly for an absurdly macho brand of four-wheel drive. Then again, most television academics had their paws in any pot they could find. The public was fickle, fame precarious and life expectancy so long that everyone needed a pension plan. Jesse Kale was what, 38? He looked like the sort of bloke who might well live forever.
‘No rest for the wicked,’ Carrick said. He hung up. Lucy smiled wanly to herself. She was reminded of her own joke, taken by him as a compliment, that James had never knowingly entertained a thought that wasn’t a cliché.
Break a leg, she thought. She would try not to trip and do so climbing the stairs on her way to bed.
Jane put the song on again. In other circumstances, she thought that she would have been very taken with Kate Rusby’s singing. There was this poignancy to the way she interpreted a lyric and her voice had a tender, melancholic quality Jane didn’t think she had heard in any other singer’s delivery before. Maybe it was a folk thing, but she didn’t think so. It was a quality particular to the petite woman they called the Barnsley Nightingale. She was genuinely talented. The song, The Recruited Collier, was affecting and sad. Or it would have been, had Jane not become aware of it in so troubling a way.
She had met Edith in her dormitory and they had walked through the grounds because the day was so beautiful and the walk a part of the ritual they always indulged when Jane visited and it didn’t happen to be pouring with rain. Her first thought on properly seeing her daughter, once their embrace of greeting had broken, was of how well she looked. She seemed to have grown a bit and her eyes held a bright sparkle and her complexion glowed with health.
She could be cold with her mother. The break-up between her parents, the isolation it inflicted, had left her eventually with a capacity for objectivity most people only achieved in adulthood. School had further increased her independence. She was generally loving and open but never came across as needy, Jane supposed because she did not want to risk further disappointment.
‘I’ve just finished speaking to Mrs Sullivan.’
‘But she wasn’t the reason you came.’
‘No. She wasn’t.’
‘You came because of New Hope Island.’
They had been walking, arm in arm. Jane stopped and so Edith stopped too. She smiled at her mother and Jane realised with a shock that their eye level shared parity. They were now the same height. Her daughter would soon grow taller than she was.
‘I read the article in the paper, mum, that one written by Lucy Church?’
Jane opened her mouth to chastise Edith for up-speak, but thought better of doing so straight away. They all did it. ‘What did you think?’
‘I think you have to go. Come on, it’s not even a question. Everyone here’s buzzing with it already. The whole world will be watching and you’ll be there. How cool is that? I just wish I was coming with you.’
‘Not possible. It will mean you spending the summer with your father.’
They had resumed their stroll. Edith didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, ‘I’ve been kind of off with dad, haven’t I.
’
‘I’ve known warmer nuclear winters,’ Jane said.
‘What’s a nuclear winter?’
‘Honestly. Do you know what it costs to send you here?’
‘Relax, mum. We did the Cuban Missile Crisis in history last term. When the world was nearly destroyed by atomic war?’
‘So you’ve been thinking about your father.’
‘I’ve been unkind to him.’
Jane didn’t say anything. She thought what Edith had actually been was indifferent to her dad, which was worse.
‘Mrs Sullivan is worried about these dreams, Edie. That’s what I talked to her about. And having spoken to her, I’m worried too. It’s a bit weird, to say the least. Tell me about them.’
‘He says it’s a song a woman should sing. He sings it, but that’s the reason he says he taught it to me.’
‘Who did?’
‘His name is Jacob Parr. He’s from the olden days. He smokes a clay pipe and his teeth are totally gross. He’s kind and patient though.’
‘You know the song. You can even play it. Why are you still dreaming about him?’
‘He says he has important things to tell me but the time isn’t yet right. I think the song was a sort of test.’
‘Testing what?’
‘That he’s not dealing with a total moron, when the time comes to tell me the important stuff.’
‘Are you afraid of Jacob Parr?’
‘No.’
‘How friendly is friendly?’
‘He doesn’t come on to me, mum. They’re not those types of dreams.’
‘They still sound a bit sinister.’
‘They’re not. He’s Jacob Parr. He’s just a guy from the olden days. He’s not exactly Freddy Krueger or Jigsaw.’
‘How do you know about Freddy Krueger?’
‘Some of the girls on the dorm are totally into horror.’
‘Who’s Jigsaw?’
‘You don’t even want to know.’
‘Do you watch horror DVD’s?’
‘No. I’m not into any of that stuff. Really I’m not.’
The Colony Trilogy Page 8