‘Tell me about the men,’ McClain said. He obviously wanted to extract as much information from her as possible before any emotion hit.
The male retreaters were William Thompson and Freddie Boyle. William – definitely not a Bill – was a merchant banker with a prestigious job in the Square Mile and a long-held ambition to write historical novels set in the Napoleonic era and all featuring the same group of core characters on whom he’d done quite a bit of preparatory work. Real events would provide his plots but he was nervous about actually starting.
‘He was in his fifties, I’d say, and his fear of failure, in someone so successful, was a real obstacle.’
‘Would you call this nervousness acute?’
‘Yes, I would.’
‘Interesting.’
‘He didn’t strike me as a mass-killer,’ Ruthie said, ‘just a senior executive who was good with figures, dubious about stepping out of his comfort zone.’
‘And Freddie Boyle?’
‘Definitely the most colourful of the group,’ she said. ‘He’d been a tabloid reporter all his working life until the internet made him obsolete and he got laid off. He said he’d worked for the same newspaper group for more than 40 years and hinted at a generous redundancy pay-out.’
‘What did he want to write?’
‘You’d assume pulp-fiction looking at him and listening to his newsroom war stories. He’d been a crime reporter and he’d seen and heard it all.’
‘Assuming he was to be believed.’
‘I believed him. But he wanted to write a children’s book, about a bullied boy who overcomes his oppressors and his fears. He wanted to write something that would not just entertain, but do some good.’
Ruthie shivered.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I’m talking about them all in the past tense. That’s only natural, but it also seems a bit morbid and final. They were just normal people, painfully normal really. I only hope they’re all okay.’
‘You’ve sketched out the group. Now tell me about the retreaters’ leader. Tell me about Dennis Thorpe.’
‘I didn’t like him.’
‘I’ve gathered that.’
‘He was the principle reason I didn’t go.’
Ruthie left their pavement table with its ashtray clogged and her stomach bilious from too much coffee about 20 minutes later. She got to her cottage home and brushed her teeth and resolved for probably the hundredth time that year to give up smoking. It was June and she thought a hundred broken resolutions probably par for her personal course. It was almost the longest day, the summer equinox. A year went nowhere, did it, these days?
She’d wondered how the clever detective sergeant had known she was single. To some astute people someone youngish and unattached probably wore their failure to find romantic fulfilment like a badge. Was she youngish? Her reflection still insisted emphatically that she was. She was 33. But it was a question really of perspective. On a maternity ward in a hospital, her age in years would categorise her as elderly.
She took a shower and changed and then tried to settle down to some work. She was just over halfway through writing a pre-teen novel she was supposed to complete by the beginning of August. She’d had plenty of momentum with it so far, was pleased with what she’d done, and knew where the story was going and how it was going to get there. She was slightly stressed, as she always was at this stage because if it ran out of steam now she’d have wasted weeks of her life and thousands of words of work. This hadn’t happened to her so far, but she always felt that underlying edginess until the final sentence was completed on the last page. She was, though, a long way short of panic.
This was just as well, because she found that afternoon that she couldn’t work at all. Instead she thought about the New Hope Island retreaters and specifically about their leader, Dennis Thorpe, a glib and handsome 34 year old with a well-established reputation as a successful writer of paranormal fiction and someone she’d thought was hiding something significant from the world.
He’d written five novels, one a year from his best-selling debut at the age of 24 and she’d read and enjoyed all of them. The final book had been set on a fictional island very similar to the factual location of New Hope. It had centred on an itinerant soldier of fortune turned bohemian writer and recluse. He was trying to make a living as a crofter as the only inhabitant of the island and as such bore a strong resemblance to the real-life New Hope settler David Shanks.
Shanks had been turned into a rebel and iconoclast by what he’d witnessed on the Western Front in the Great War. It was totally in character for him not to be intimidated by the island’s history. The enduring mystery of what had happened to Seamus Ballantyne’s Kingdom of Belief almost two centuries earlier was of no material concern to him. He’d wanted to settle somewhere otherwise uninhabited. He’d built a one-room cottage on New Hope. But then things must have taken a turn for the weird.
He’d been confronted by an occult presence that famously, he’d managed to catch on cine film. But the film had been out of the public domain for more than 70 years. And most of the people who’d viewed it in the 1930s had thought it faked. Shanks in life had fled New Hope after seeing this apparition. In Thorpe’s novel, his protagonist was instead tormented by the drowned crew of a wrecked fishing vessel. But he didn’t run. He held out. The haunting stopped when he hammered together a driftwood monument on the island’s highest promontory to acknowledge and commemorate their deaths. Unburied, that tribute gave their spirits rest.
Thorpe’s lonely and ghost-plagued hero hammered the last nail into his memorial as dusk descended. Then he went back to his one-room cottage at the island’s western extremity to see if he’d finally be left alone. It was the closing chapter of the book, rich with tension and dread, and Thorpe had written nothing better and since then, nothing at all.
Well, writers got blocked. It happened to the best of them. Except that Ruthie now suspected there was more to it with Dennis Thorpe and that some secret agenda informed his whole New Hope project. It had been haphazard and badly thought-out because it was only the cover for something.
Thorpe had an ulterior motive in going to the island. He’d make a good few quid out of the exercise personally, but the motive wasn’t profit. The retreat guaranteed him company. The creative potential of his retreaters didn’t matter a damn to him. He had business of some private and secret nature on New Hope, but he didn’t want to be there on his own.
‘He didn’t dare,’ Ruthie said to herself, thinking how good a gin and tonic would taste, if she wasn’t observing her strict six-o’clock rule. She looked at the wristwatch she’d put on after her shower. It was only just after three. She went to the fridge and poured herself a glass of Chablis. It was deliciously cold and crisp and in Ruthie’s world, white wine didn’t really qualify as an alcoholic drink.
Her drinking was a matter of complex checks and balances, dense equations, trade-offs debated fiercely behind closed doors in the conference room of her mind. At her most objective about herself, Ruthie knew that she fretted about drinking much more than she actually drank. She considered pubs cheerful places but generally preferred their jolly atmosphere to any seriously heavy patronage of the products they sold.
Just occasionally, she did go to the dogs. There was always more of the spontaneous than the desperate about these infrequent lapses. They were always in pursuit of a good time and never a sad quest in search of oblivion. Alcohol for her was never a crutch, always a springboard and the purpose of a springboard was to enable you to bounce. But she felt this tendency to sometimes over-indulge made her someone sometimes slightly less than totally reliable.
DS Nick McClain sat in his hotel room with his eyes trained vacantly on the pretty seascape through the window and his mind focused wholly on the enigmatic history of New Hope Island.
Seamus Ballantyne was the master of a slave vessel who repented, according to the legend, quite suddenly on the cobbled quayside of
his native city of Liverpool. He became a hellfire preacher and eventually founded the Colony he led on what he christened New Hope Island in the 1820s. He never explained why he chose the Outer Hebrides, too much the demagogue for his acolytes to query the decision. He singled out an isolated rock on a maritime chart. They simply followed his charismatic lead.
At first this community, this self-styled Kingdom of Belief, prospered. The Colony traded the wool it gathered and the whisky it distilled with merchants from the mainland. And it was one of these, a dozen years after the Colony’s establishment, who went there and discovered that the entire population of about 140 souls had simply vanished without trace.
The New Hope Island disappearance was a mystery to rival the enigma of the Marie Celeste. And in 2010, when he needed a circulation boost for his ailing flagship title, media mogul Alexander McIntyre had come up with the ruse of financing an expedition made up of experts who would finally and definitively solve it.
One of those experts had been a detective named Patrick Lassiter. A losing battle with alcohol had forced him to resign his CID post and at the time of the expedition, he was a private investigator on McIntyre’s payroll.
Now he was back on the Force, his demons beaten and happily married to an eminent and rather glamorous psychiatrist. At least, DS McClain thought she was glamorous, going through some of the notes in his case file in his room at a hotel in Ventnor, perusing her head-and-shoulders shot.
‘You’re a lucky man,’ he said, studying Lassiter’s picture, aware that he now held the exalted rank of Commander and headed up the Cold Case Division at New Scotland Yard. He was good as well as lucky, having sustained a conviction rate throughout his police career few officers could ever come close to achieving. It was four o’clock, the time scheduled for their pre-arranged conversation and McClain felt more nervous than he’d felt since being a lowly probationer as he called the direct line he’d been given.
‘It’s DS McClain, Commander, of Western Isles Area Command?’
‘You’re punctual, Detective Sergeant. How’s your witness?’
‘Bright, precise and cooperating fully.’
‘She’s an extremely fortune young woman.’
‘From which I take it you think they’re dead.’
‘The island’s got form.’
‘Funny, she said the same thing.’
‘There’s nothing funny about New Hope. It’s a hazardous place.’
McClain sensed some ambiguity there. He said, ‘Naturally hazardous?’
‘I’d say inherently so.’
‘I’ve thought about that; about rip-tides and exposure and sea-fog and rogue waves and hypothermia and all the rest. And none of it explains how seven people can just vanish without a corpse or any other shred of forensic evidence or sign of a struggle. It’s baffling.’
Quietly, Commander Lassiter said, ‘Are you recording this?’
‘No, Sir. I’m not.’
‘You’ve viewed the Shanks footage?’
‘You wouldn’t believe the strings we had to pull to get access to that, Commander. It was barely in our hands for half an hour. I saw it yesterday.’
‘What was your personal conclusion?’
‘It was impossible, so it was terrifying, because I couldn’t help thinking it was genuine.’
‘I know the provenance of the film because I’m the man who tracked it down, back when I was working as a private eye hired by McIntyre. Frankly that was a low, dark time in my life. I’d sunk further than I’d ever imagined or feared was possible.’
‘But you still had your knack for detection.’
‘Shanks had a son, who’d died of cancer in late middle-age while resident in a care home. His death occurred two years before the McIntyre expedition. The home had one of those odd-job staffers who ran it as a personal fiefdom.’
‘The sort who helps himself to the booty of the dearly-departed, you mean.’
‘The son had no dependents. His good stuff had gone to auction and the tat to a local junk shop. The film can was still gathering dust there on a shelf where I found it in 2010. David Shanks had labeled it and it hadn’t been opened in decades, I don’t think.’
‘So you think it’s genuine too?’
Lassiter was silent for a long moment. Then he said, ‘What I think is that New Hope Island is a bad place. It’s a malevolent place. What I think is that you won’t find the people you’re looking for alive. In fact I don’t think you’ll find them at all.’
‘And you’ve been there,’ McClain said.
‘Yes, my lad,’ Lassiter said. ‘God help me, I have.’
‘I’m grateful for your input, Commander.’
‘That’s an extravagant term for a bit of background, detective-sergeant, but please feel free to keep in touch.’
Chapter Two
No comms equipment. No proper stuff, anyway. That had been one of Dennis Thorpe’s many fuckwit stipulations. Except that ‘fuckwit’ was the wrong word now, because he’d had Dennis Thorpe – precious, impractical, airy-fairy Dennis Thorpe – all wrong. No weapons, obviously, beyond what he might be able to improvise. Most critically, he had no rations. There were ways of finding water. Food was the problem. At least, it was one of his problems, there on the list of them he’d compiled in his mind.
Plus points? He was warm and he was dry and he was still, for the moment, breathing. He hadn’t really been hurt physically and so far, he remained undiscovered.
Terry Conway checked the integrity of the roof of the hide he’d built himself in its crypt-like blackness with his fingertips and reminded himself that he hadn’t last been Terry Conway since the age of 23. Since then he’d been Freddie Boyle, loquacious, back-slapping, chortling Freddie Boyle, the extrovert life-and-soul of his daily paper’s newsroom.
He’d been a man popular with his colleagues, but they would have despised him had they known his true and secret history before coming among their number. No one had liked the British Army on general liberal principle way back in in 1972. The trigger-happy Parachute Regiment had seen to that in Belfast at the beginning of the year on what became known to history as Bloody Sunday.
He (Terry – Freddie had fucked off), didn’t know what his intention was beyond survival, here. He’d remembered who he was on the island, or more accurately who it was he’d been. He’d discovered he still had stamina and field-craft and a strong instinct for staying alive. What he didn’t have, yet, was a plan.
It had been easy, knowing what to do, when he’d last practiced these skills all those years ago. He’d operated under an alias and affected a Dublin brogue and his job had been spotting, surveilling and then slotting the farm boys who hid Barrett Light sniper rifles and Semtex explosives in their barns and cowsheds just the other side of the border.
For a couple of years, mostly in South Armagh, he’d fought that dirty war, dirtily. He’d been the hunter rather than the hunted right up to the day when his cover was finally blown and they hauled him out, literally, aboard a Wessex chopper chuntering through the night sky all the way back to Blighty and the regiment’s Hereford base.
Night was approaching here, now. He calculated that it was probably about 6 in the evening. It didn’t really go properly dark at all this far north at this time of the year but night, though once his good and faithful friend, wouldn’t really be of any help to him on the island.
Terry had led two lives. One had been brief and thrilling and the other long and lubricious with Fleet Street booze and Fleet Street gossip on generous tabloid expenses. Most people got one life he suspected didn’t match up to either of those he’d experienced. He was the wrong side of 60. If it all ended now, he couldn’t complain, could he?
Except that Terry didn’t want it to end cowering in a hole he’d scraped from reluctant ground as a desolate refuge. He didn’t want his life to end in bleak perversity. It wasn’t right or natural and there were things he hadn’t done. Absurdly, he thought then of the pet project that had brought
him there; the children’s book he hadn’t written and might now never get the opportunity to write. It was a shame. It would have been affecting and entertaining and would have done some residual good.
He heard a sound then. Someone or something was singing. The singer’s voice was a moan of grief, coarse and inhuman. He recognised the song as the volume of the singing strengthened steadily with the singer’s approach. He held his breath. He rippled with gooseflesh as proud on his skin as brail.
It was a song Kate Rusby sang. It was Who Will Sing Me Lullabies. He knew it because his daughter played the album from which it came sometimes in her car. Sweet, obliging Daisy, who’d happily pick her dad up from the pub when he’d had one over the eight and chauffeur him back to his comfy suburban home. And half-cut in the passenger seat, Terry, who’d always behaved as Freddie in his daughter’s presence, would hum along to its infectious, folky melodies.
Terry Conway swallowed terror, trying to regulate the lurching thump of his heart. Silently, he mouthed a prayer to a God he hadn’t thus troubled since his childhood. He’d prayed often for relief from the boys who’d bullied him daily then, but his pleas had gone unanswered.
Ruthie got to the Spyglass ten minutes early so she could smoke without incurring that look from Nick McClain that asked why someone with so much to live for appeared so intent on committing voluntary euthanasia. She was quite good at handling emotional responses but didn’t welcome pity. She had resisted any temptation to go to the dogs in the afternoon. She’d had just the one glass of wine and then napped for an hour and felt sufficiently rejuvenated on waking on her sitting room sofa to write 500 pretty good words as late afternoon crept into early evening.
He arrived wearing a pale blue suit she thought probably less expensive than it appeared. He was sufficiently well put together to make it seem bespoke, when it was more likely off the peg. Men with good bodies could work that sartorial trick. He also had on just a bit too much Polo aftershave.
The Colony Trilogy Page 30