‘Sorry.’
‘What happened in Liverpool is precisely why I’m going with Alice to the island. She’s determined to go. I have to go with her.’
They said their goodbyes. Fortescue put his mobile down on the desk thinking that Patrick Lassiter was a very fortunate man. This was neither because he had conquered his personal demons, nor because of his imminent departure on an expedition the whole world seemed intrigued about. It was because he had never felt so strongly about a woman as Lassiter so plainly did, and he envied him the unselfish strength of that attachment.
Chapter Thirteen
McIntyre threw a cocktail party on the eve of the expedition’s departure. Attendance wasn’t mandatory, but Lucy thought it would have been a rash member who spurned their invitation. By the time the pictures of the event were published in the following morning’s paper, the people wearing black tie and evening gowns and baring their photogenic smiles would be aboard a Lear jet taking them to Edinburgh and the choppers that would deposit them and their investigative hardware on the island.
Even to her deliberately jaundiced eye, they looked a glamorous collection of experts. Karl Cooper, despite the vanity and apparent taste for domestic violence, looked like a matinee idol slipping gracefully into grey-templed maturity. Jesse Kale had a swaggering charisma, brain and brawn immaculately attired and almost twinkling in the happy galaxy of the other guests. When Cooper and Kale huddled, it was like a moment, Lucy thought, from one of those buddy movies with a pair of competing leads.
Jane Chambers was poised and slender in black silk and a diamond choker, her blonde hair worn loosely, splashing across her shoulders. She had a hauteur Lucy knew to be a total and even poignant misrepresentation of the woman’s complex character. It was skin deep at best. But in a situation as glitzy and superficial as this one, it worked.
Alice Lang’s sexuality was more blatant than Jane’s. Her full-lipped mouth wore almost a pout in repose. She had a ripe, succulent look, voluptuous even in the sober grey trouser suit she wore. Again, the air of serene sensuality she exuded was far from being the complete picture. Or story, come to that. Lucy had the sense that Alice was afraid of her gift and lived almost in dread of the revelations it forced upon her. She was almost a martyr to the awful truths it disclosed.
Degrelle, that terrible priestly show-off, wore a cape. Lucy did not think a cape an item of clothing many men could wear without looking ridiculous in the second decade of the 21st century. But the exorcist did not look foolish in the slightest. He looked dashing and formidable, with his club fists and brooding air of an ageing pugilist. As she had said in the piece he had complimented her on moments earlier, he resembled a cleric prepared to look for the knockout in the championship rounds in the ring with Satan himself.
James Carrick, she was starting to worry about. He had a slightly haunted look. His usual bonhomie was missing. His hail-fellow-well-met persona was absent without leave and Marsden and McIntyre were highly likely to notice it had gone and demand it return immediately. It was much of what the paper paid his salary for. They had not hired a gloomy introvert. He had aged about ten years in the two weeks since he had announced, in that late night phone call, that he was the second staffer going to New Hope. He had sounded casual. Fraudulently so, she now realised.
‘There’s less to me than meets the eye,’ he had always been fond of saying. ‘Deep down inside, I’m really shallow.’ Lucy was beginning to think that the opposite was true. To her own astonishment, she felt a stab of pity for her department head she had never dreamed he would evoke in her.
Patrick Lassiter was the major surprise. In the file pictures, in his Met days, he had looked rather sallow and slightly hollow-eyed. In the flesh, he was tall and handsome and his brown eyes were shrewd and focussed. He held your gaze when he spoke to you and he was articulate and considered and sometimes mordantly funny in what he said.
Looking at them all, chatting casually to them in McIntyre’s cathedral-sized atrium, she felt quite proud of the work she had accomplished for the paper in the lead up to the moment of departure. Her profiles had made a family of them. She had skilfully fostered the feeling that they were united in their cause, bonded in their ambition to finally crack one of history’s most stubborn mysteries.
Her feeling was that the nation was collectively rooting for the New Hope expeditionaries. They were intrepid and adventurous. They were knowledgeable and fearless and were widely admired as such. She had written her features about them with that supposition in mind.
Almost as if reading her thoughts, McIntyre approached her. He beamed. He seemed not so much happy as exultant.
‘Seeing them assembled like this makes me realise what a grand job you’ve done, Lucy, and just how hard you’ve worked on this. You deserve to be congratulated.’
‘Thanks. I’ve never enjoyed working on a series more.’
McIntyre sipped champagne. His eyes roamed the room but she had his attention. ‘Do you say that out of vanity?’
‘It’s nice to get the prominent by-lines and have an audience of millions reading and discussing your stuff. But I think it’s because I’m so sold on the story myself. I’ve been fascinated by the mystery since I was a child. Rather like you, I imagine.’
His eyes swivelled to meet hers. They narrowed. ‘Think we’ll solve the mystery?’
To her own surprise, she realised it was not a question to which she had given sufficient thought. She had not really considered it, since doing so briefly prior to her initial phone interview with Jane Chambers and their discussion of the epidemic theory.
‘I do,’ she said. And suddenly, she knew with certainty that she really did. ‘I don’t see how we can fail.’
‘Frankly, neither do I,’ he said. ‘You’ll be there when the moment of revelation occurs. You will witness history.’
‘You won’t be there yourself, Mr McIntyre?’
‘Wouldn’t wish to steal someone else’s glory,’ he said, ‘though I shall visit, once the mystery is irrefutably solved.’
He treated her to a courtly bow and moved away. And Lucy wondered which of the competing theories her paper’s proprietor believed would finally prove correct. He was rumoured to be close to Karl Cooper. Cooper denied it, but James Carrick’s gossip was almost always factually reliable.
She saw Carrick, standing by himself, staring into his champagne cocktail with unfocussed eyes over by the main entrance. Or exit, she thought, thinking that doors worked both ways in her capricious trade and that James needed to shape up pretty soon or Marsden would be shipping him out.
That was the sort of mixing of metaphors that the old James would have celebrated gleefully. But the new James didn’t look in the mood at all for wordplay on the subject of dismissal. Lucy wondered could he be talked round. Loyalty obliged her to try so she walked across to where he stood.
‘I’d offer you a penny for them,’ she said, ‘but that would be a grossly inflated price.’
He smiled, or tried to. The result was not a success. ‘I’m thinking of resigning, Lucy.’
‘You’re kidding me.’
‘I’m not. I have two kids, a wife with a heavy shopping habit, a large mortgage and negligible savings. I also have a really terrible feeling about this whole misguided adventure.’
‘Why do you think it misguided?’
‘I don’t know. I mean I don’t know specifically. I just know that the thought of getting on that plane tomorrow morning fills me with dread. There’s no other word. I’m not just not looking forward to this. I’m actually dreading it.’
‘Are we discussing a premonition?’
Carrick blew out air. ‘I think it might be.’
‘Premonitions are surely Alice Lang’s department,’ Lucy said.
‘No, they’re not. She’s psychic. But she sees the past, not the future.’
A waiter came by bearing a tray of tiny biscuits piled with caviar and soured cream. ‘The condemned man ate a heart repast,
’ Carrick said. But he shook his head and waved the man away without taking anything from the tray.
‘I’ve never seen you like this.’
‘I’ve never been like this, not in public.’
‘Don’t do what you’re thinking of doing. Don’t throw your career away, James. Not over the prospect of a few windswept weeks off the Scottish coast. It’ll be tolerable. It might even offer moments of fun. The New Hope mystery will get nailed for good and all and a delirious McIntyre will sanction generous bonuses all round.’
Carrick tried to smile again, his second unsuccessful attempt. ‘If you sold mobile phones for a living,’ he said, ‘you’d starve to death.’
‘I’m not the one about to jack in my job.’
‘Which you’ll probably inherit, yet you’re trying to convince me to keep. You’re a very nice person, Lucy. You’re both talented and good. I don’t think I’ve told you that often enough. I might never have said it, in fact. There’s a lot of things I should’ve said but never did.’
‘You’re sounding like a suicide note.’
‘There are other jobs. I’m not unemployable.’
‘When are you thinking of doing it?’
‘No time like the present,’ Carrick said.
‘Sleep on it. Please just sleep on it. It won’t be the end of the world if you’re a no show at the airport. Give yourself between now and tomorrow morning. You might see things completely differently in daylight, James.’
He frowned. He leaned forward and kissed Lucy tenderly on the cheek. There was nothing sexual in the gesture. It was a spontaneous display of fondness and respect and she took it as the compliment it was. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Lucy. I’ll do as you suggest.’
Lucy felt a tap on the shoulder and turned to face Karl Cooper, smiling his stellar smile, his eyes gravitated firmly towards the cleavage her Empire style dress revealed.
‘You don’t normally dress like that.’
‘I’m dressed for the occasion.’
‘Jeans and a leather jacket are more your style. And that Zippo lighter for your American cigarettes and the Harley Davidson, of course. Practically trade marks.’
‘The bike was a Triumph Bonneville and I sold it last year. I don’t court celebrity, Mr Cooper.’
‘Karl, please,’ he said. ‘You might not court celebrity, but thanks to the expedition, you have a high public profile. Lucy Church is practically a household name.’
She nodded. She knew what his inference was. Thanks to people like me, was his unspoken coda. It was undeniably true. She was becoming famous, or at least sort of famous, by association. ‘Do you think I should feel grateful?’
‘I think you should agree to have dinner with me.’
‘Share dinner for two, on New Hope Island?’ She laughed. She was incredulous. ‘Boil in the bag over a Primus stove?’
‘Conditions might be more luxurious than you think,’ he said. ‘Our patron has deep pockets and a considerate nature.’ His voice was deliberately soft but his cheeks had coloured. He was not a man who enjoyed being made fun of and it showed.
‘I think I’ll take a rain check, Karl.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘rain is something the Hebrides has plenty of.’
Nothing at all had registered on the first of the cameras. It looked brand new to Napier, as though the lens cap had never been removed and it had never even been switched on. The lens cap had been removed from the second camera, though. In common with the first, it was digital and again, no images had been captured on it. It had been turned on, but there had not been time to point it at anything and the monitor just registered a dark flicker he assumed was the out of focus hull of the boat, pictured in cloudy darkness.
There was sound, though. The second camera had recorded the sound of what had gone on. The screams of the men who had been aboard were anguished and terrified and though this deathly soundtrack was only a couple of minutes long, it seemed to go on and on to those enduring hearing it. Then it finally stopped. The men listening to it looked at one another without apparent surprise.
‘You were right, Walker,’ Napier said. ‘None of them made it.’
‘It came at them too fast,’ Davis said, ‘and in darkness.’
‘They saw it though,’ Walker said.
‘Unless they just felt it,’ Napier said, ‘whatever the fuck it was.’
No man is an island. That was Napier’s belief, unless maybe if your name was Seamus Ballantyne. Except that Ballantyne and his entire community had come to a sticky end, hadn’t they? No man is an island; it was the reason he had shared this experience with Davis and Walker. He hadn’t been able to face it alone.
Earlier, he had shown them the gruesome relic retrieved from the crofter’s cottage after Blake’s disappearance. They were good men. He needed allies in this, whatever this transpired eventually to be. He even told them about The Recruited Collier and the clay pipe he’d discovered, still warm, what seemed about a century ago, but was only a fortnight past. Neither of them laughed. It transpired that Walker was a Kate Rusby fan himself. He’d seen her at the Cambridge Folk Festival two years on the trot, he confessed.
They were silent together after listening to the sound of the crew and passengers aboard the rigid inflatable perish in the night. Napier knew it had not been the sound of men in the water, drowning. He had heard that once after a NATO training fuck-up in heavy fog off the coast of Norway and awful as it had been, this was worse. Something predatory had got them, something hungry and formidable in water too cold for sharks.
He reached for the whisky bottle. Troy, the construction ganger had left it for him as a parting gift and he was grateful for it now as he poured a slug into each of the mugs of tea the three of them had. It took the dry edge off the powdered milk. It delivered much needed warmth to the belly. It was wholly against the rules laid down by the people paying them but Napier was of the belief that the game had changed to the point where entirely new rules were required. In the material absence of a superior, he felt wholly justified in framing them.
To Napier, Walker said, ‘Davis told me about that stuff he saw in the Congo, Sir. Wasn’t talking behind your back. He told me he’d told you too.’
‘And I told him about that morning at the cottage,’ Davis said. ‘The point is all the lads have sensed it, Sir. The island isn’t right. It’s wrong in a powerful way. It’s corrupt in a way that’s much worse than Africa was.’
‘Worse in what sense, Davis?’
‘Bigger. More powerful. It’s concentrated near the crofter’s cottage. But it’s everywhere on the rock.’
‘It was offshore when it got those blokes,’ Walker said, nodding at the camera.
Napier was silent for a long moment. Then he said to Davis, ‘What’s the mood?’
‘It’s pretty sombre, Sir. The lads are spooked. They’re game enough but none of us is armed and even if we were, you can’t fight shadows.’
‘You can look at the positives,’ Walker said. ‘We’ve taken no casualties. Our unit is intact. We have food and fuel and shelter. We’re being paid.’
‘We’re doing our job,’ Davis said. He laughed, without humour. He gestured at the camera, ‘When someone’s not doing it for us.’
Napier said, looking at Davis, ‘Your word, corrupt, strikes me as the right one to describe this place. But Walker’s right too. We’ve taken no casualties. We’ve retained our unit strength and capability. The integrity of our camp remains uncompromised. I’m as unnerved as anyone on the island. But we’ll be at full expedition strength here in less than 24 hours. The island will be crawling with new personnel. Now is not the time to request evacuation, boys.’
‘Agreed,’ Davis said, nodding.
‘Walker?’
‘I’m like all the lads, Sir. I shit bricks at night here, but I trust your judgement. We all do. We know what you did in Afghanistan. The bottom line is you lead and we’ll follow.’
It was difficult not to look
at the camera, not to think about the murky anguish of the night screams it had recorded. Napier had lost his nerve in Afghanistan. He knew that, just as he knew that to some extent at least, he had recovered it since. He thought it would be tested here, again, in this awful place. The experts and their various bits of pricey paraphernalia would arrive in the morning. And his private belief was that they would make no difference to the threat they faced at all.
McIntyre brooded in his library after the departure of his last guest. He sipped brandy and pondered on the events he had personally sent careening into motion.
Latest figures showed the circulation of the paper had now risen 40 per cent since the announcement that the expedition was scheduled to begin. Ad revenues were up 60 per cent. Pagination had increased by 30 per cent. They had gone from running two to four editions on the newsstand every day. New Hope Island had captured, or recaptured, the imagination of the world.
And in the face of all this achievement, McIntyre felt none of the triumph he had anticipated he would. Instead, he felt hollow and even slightly afraid. These were new and unwelcome sensations and he thought that he knew what had engendered them in him.
It was doubt. He was beginning to doubt his own theory as to the nature of the New Hope vanishing. Ever since Lassiter’s discovery of the cine film shot on New Hope by David Shanks, the case to be made for activity there beyond the rational had been steadily stacking up.
He could no longer dismiss the spectre on the film as something Shanks had conjured in his own amateur dabbling with magic. Lassiter’s experience in the basement of the Maritime Museum in Liverpool contradicted that theory. There was something malevolent and unnatural about the contents of the sea chest and the chest had belonged to Seamus Ballantyne.
And there was the way that Shanks’s wraith was attired, wasn’t there? The spectre had been dressed in clothing from the time not of the crofter, but of the settlement. It was a detail that could not be glossed over or blithely ignored.
The slave-ship master had brought something evil with him to New Hope Island. It had festered and grown and destroyed his community. This unearthly affliction had been spiteful and destructive. It had not arrived from another galaxy, aboard a spacecraft armed only with enlightened intent.
The Colony Trilogy Page 16