He got them drinks and joined her at her table outside and stared at the wristwatch she hadn’t been wearing when they’d met earlier at the ice-cream parlour. It was a man’s vintage Rolex Air King on a steel bracelet and had cost her a lot more than her haircuts did. He took this detail in without comment and she was reminded that he didn’t miss much. It was why she had emptied the ashtray a minute before his prompt appearance there. He’d been right that she didn’t care what most people thought of her but the Scottish policeman wasn’t most people. He was intelligent, conscientious and shrewd. She wondered, not for the first time that day, what had led to his divorce. But she had more pressing concerns on her mind, relating to the disappearance.
‘They weren’t planning on taking a radio transmitter so they’d have had no regular communication with anyone,’ she said. ‘How did you find out they’d gone?’
‘We knew they were there because they chartered a boat from the mainland to take them and its skipper alerted the coastguard. That’s routine procedure, the crossing’s hazardous. We have a lot of tourists in the Hebrides and a duty of care. Their encampment was by the Colony’s old dock and so visible to passing vessels. We requested the trawlers keep an eye on them, unobtrusively, just training their binoculars, nothing to compromise the solitude they were after.’
‘And then one day they were just gone?’
‘Three days ago the crew of a fishing boat thought the camp looked disheveled. Two of the tents had collapsed and had been left like that. They were sufficiently concerned to row an inflatable ashore. The camp wasn’t just ramshackle, it was abandoned. Not a living soul to be seen.’
Ruthie shivered. She said, ‘Sounds like they got more solitude than they were after.’
‘We don’t know what they got,’ McClain said, ‘or what got them. That’s the problem.’
‘What was on the Shanks cine film?’
‘I think we should eat first,’ he said.
‘Talk about dragging it out.’
‘I don’t think you’ll have much appetite afterwards, is all.’
‘I told you earlier I haven’t led a sheltered life.’
‘What does that mean, exactly?’
‘It doesn’t mean I’m an easy lay. It doesn’t mean I have a problem with drugs. In this specific instance, it means I’ve past experience of the paranormal. I mean fairly recent personal experience. I don’t believe in elves or faeries at the bottom of the garden.’
‘You write about those things.’
‘I do that for an audience of pre-teens. What I’m telling you now is that I’m not skeptical, but I’m not easily shocked, either. Nothing will put me off my dinner.’
Ruthie’s personal run-in with matters uncanny had occurred the previous summer. An architect from the mainland had been building his dream holiday home on a coastal stretch just outside Ventnor and had noticed some anomalies there. The company selling the land said nothing had ever been built there before. But the texture of the grass at the spot was different from that surrounding it; coarser and stronger and with a salt tang to the taste. And aerial photography the architect had done revealed the rectangular physical scar of a substantial structure on the earth. She’d been recommended to him as someone familiar with the area’s history.
After some research, she discovered that the plot had once been occupied by the Jericho Redoubt – a temple belonging to an obscure religious cult, deliberately destroyed by an arson attack in the 1920s. No one was ever convicted or even charged with the crime and she suspected the authorities had not only turned a blind-eye to the temple’s destruction but quite probably orchestrated the attack.
By the time the architect became alert to the danger he was in on his blighted plot, his family were occupying the house and his nine-year-old daughter wasn’t any longer behaving much like a nine-year-old at all. She displayed a sudden and mature aptitude for the sport of tennis. Her speech became characterised by the phraseology and slang of pre-war England, accented in the received pronunciation of the period. When she spoke to her father the meaning of what she said seemed increasingly ambiguous, then sarcastic and as time went by and her persona further changed, sardonically hostile.
The girl suffered from Still’s Disease, which had attacked the development of her lower jaw from birth and left her generally physically frail. It was the principle motive for her family’s planned refuge on Wight, where her parents hoped she might thrive in the warmth and the sun; but where without surgical intervention, she became suddenly robust and her facial features started subtly to alter and begin to balance out in a manner medically inexplicable.
Ruthie became convinced she was witnessing a case of possession. More importantly, she was able to convince the architect of this, who fled the place with his family before the transformation could become complete. If a big part of him wanted his daughter healthy and whole, a bigger part of him wanted her to remain his daughter.
The Jericho Society had enacted a ritual decades earlier enabling someone dead to come back at the expense of someone living. They’d approached an eminent English artist resident on Wight after the early death of his tennis champion muse. In exchange for a series of paintings they commissioned, they guaranteed her return in the future to life. It was an occult bargain described in an account the painter wrote, Ruthie found and she persuaded the girl’s father to read.
Thus Ruthie played her part in preventing something diabolical. Elsewhere in the episode, though, she let herself down rather badly. And his misadventure on Wight cost the architect his marriage. Prior to the incident, she’d had an interest in the paranormal. After it, that had become a solid conviction.
DS McClain took out his phone. He said, ‘Alexander McIntire had a talented investigator named Patrick Lassiter source the Shanks footage shot on New Hope in 1934. He had it digitally enhanced, but he insists, not altered in any way. There’s no fakery, no smoke and mirrors. After the New Hope expedition six years ago, McIntyre donated the film to the Centre for Psychic Research.’
‘Why them?’
‘I suspect he just wanted rid of it. Like I said, I viewed the footage yesterday. I shouldn’t have taken this, didn’t seek permission and probably breached copyright, but this is a screen shot.’
He held out his phone.
Ruthie took it from him, put it on the table and linked her hands to shade the image from the light. It was a little girl. She was attired in an old-fashioned night-dress and pictured in black and white in strong sunshine on a clear day framed by the open door of a cottage to her rear with whitewashed walls.
Then the detail began to supersede Ruthie’s charmed first-impression as her eyes studied and her mind inventoried the actuality of the shot.
The night-dress was ragged and frayed. The little girl’s hair was a pale, chaotic halo of un-brushed, unwashed knotted strands. Her eyes were black holes that looked burned into her face and her mouth was only a maw, stretched in a rictus grin of malevolent rage. Lastly, of all that she took in, it registered with Ruthie then that this child-apparition’s feet, naked and filthy, trailed a good foot above the ground beneath them.
She pushed the phone away from her and fumbled for a cigarette. The Bic trembled so badly in her grip that McClain had to light it for her. She thanked him with a nod and then when the nicotine hit home, asked, ‘Who was she? I mean when she was real and alive?’
‘Not all of the people who went there six years ago survived the expedition and none of the survivors would say much about what they saw there. But the story is that Seamus Ballantyne was cursed by one of the slaves chained into his ship’s hold. His tribe credited this man with potent occult powers. He told Ballantyne he’d father a daughter who would die young and then come back to torment him.’
‘Did Ballantyne definitely have a daughter?’ asked Ruthie.
‘I don’t suppose anybody knows. Everybody from his colony disappeared at the same time.’
‘The internet rumour says he did, in which ca
se that would be Rachel Ballantyne. Not quite in the flesh, but the clothing is right, period-wise.’
‘Assume you believe in the supernatural. How long would a ghost go on manifesting like that? What would be the point, with Ballantyne no longer there to goad and frighten?’
‘That’s not a revenant, Nick, it’s demonic. It doesn’t look lost, it looks gleefully evil. That’s why Shanks fled the island. It meant him harm. He probably barely escaped it.’
‘You use some esoteric terminology.’
‘I’ve always had an interest in this stuff. That only strengthened after something I saw here last summer.’
‘Would you tell me about that?’
So Ruthie did.
When she’d finished, McClain asked, ‘What do you mean, you let yourself down rather badly?’
‘The famous painter was Sir Arthur Sedley Barrett. His tennis champion muse was named Blanche Underwood. The architect was, is, a man named Michael Aldridge. On the evening of the day I met him and he asked for my help we spoke on the phone because I’d already found some things out that struck me as ominous. I’d had a couple of drinks by then and he was very cute and had seemed quite lonely and basically I propositioned him. Not in so many words, but that’s what I was doing.’
McClain pondered on this for a moment and then shrugged. ‘This is the 21st century,’ he said.
‘Michael Aldridge was a married man. Not happily married I don’t think and at that point Katie and Molly, his wife and daughter, weren’t yet on the island. But it was an awful, unforgivable thing to do.’
McClain glanced at his phone and switched off the display, which still showed the apparition. And Ruthie imagined how Debbie Carter or Suzie Ford or the Reverend Mabel Farrow would react to seeing the apparition she just had, to seeing what had once been Rachel Ballantyne, wilful and malevolent, antic with impossible life. They would hear it as well as see it. What if it talked? They’d smell its stink of awful, centuries-old corruption too. She shuddered and saw McClain see her do it.
He shook his head. He said, ‘It’s got to be faked, logically.’
‘Terrible things occurred there, both in Ballantyne’s era and apparently also when the expeditionaries went there six years ago. Something caused them.’
‘Aren’t you glad you didn’t go?’ he said, in a futile attempt to lighten the tone.
They ate dinner at the Pond Restaurant in Bonchurch Village. McClain seemed subdued to Ruthie and she thought she could hardly blame him for that. Police detectives worked with causal and evidential chains and relied on forensic evidence and the willing participation of expert witnesses in solving crimes and nailing their perpetrators. None of that was going to happen with this latest incidence of disappearances on New Hope Island.
On top of that, her recounting of the previous summer’s events, her talk of a satanic cult and a case of incipient possession had probably left him feeling he was sharing a dinner table with someone at best naively fanciful on the subject of the paranormal. At least he hadn’t asked her had she and the architect Michael Aldridge slept together. That courtesy had impressed her because she sensed he’d been curious to know. It was none of his business, but human nature was what it was and detectives liked answers.
For want of something else to say, she asked, ‘What’s your most plausible theory? I mean in strictly conventional terms.’
He said, ‘From what you’ve told me about the character of Thorpe and the retreaters, I’d rule out any catastrophic event caused by mass hysteria. People can get worked up when they’re wrapped up in a collective project they become passionate about, but William Thompson was a banker – he wasn’t a candidate for that kind of suggestible nonsense and Freddie Boyle even less so.’
‘So they didn’t walk willingly into the sea, chanting gibberish.’
‘No. They didn’t. Mabel Farrow just wouldn’t. Incidences of suicide among the Anglican clergy are vanishingly low,’ McClain said.
‘What then, plausibly?’
‘The island’s low-lying, except towards its centre. Most likely they were overcome by the wake of a supertanker. That would overwhelm them and drag them out to sea, if they were anywhere on its coastline. Or if they were aboard a boat together, that wake could have swamped and sunk them.’
‘Wouldn’t bodies wash up?’ asked Ruthie.
‘They would, with the prevailing currents, somewhere along the mainland coast. There’s still time for that, unless they’ve been consumed as carrion by the sea’s scavengers.’
‘Ugly thought.’
‘All of it is ugly, the whole investigation, and my instinct tells me it will remain that way, permanently unresolved.’
‘Can I ask you something personal?’
He smiled and said, ‘Seems only fair, given how straight you’ve been in answering my questions.’
‘Why did your wife divorce you?’
‘It was the other way around. I divorced her on grounds of adultery. She must have known when she married a copper I’d find out if she began an affair. We tend to see through lies, tricks, fakery.’
Ruthie nodded, before jolting suddenly.
‘Something’s just come back to me,’ she said.
‘I told you it would.’
‘I think Dennis Thorpe had a practical interest in magic.’
‘Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?’
‘I mean an interest in practicing magic. Someone, it was William Thompson, mentioned Aleister Crowley and his house at Loch Ness. And Dennis Thorpe said New Hope had a magician of its own. I don’t think he was talking about Seamus Ballantyne. He must have meant David Shanks.’
‘And perhaps implies an agenda once he got there beyond providing novice fiction writers with a bit of inspiration.’
‘What will you do next, Nick?’
‘One more trip to New Hope with a dog team trained to locate human remains the Norwegian Force is lending us along with their handler. I’ll probably take a forensics team as well for a last look around. We can do it all in a day, in daylight, which is a blessing.’
‘Why haven’t the families gone to the press? They must be frantic.’
‘They’ve each been assigned a family liaison officer from their regional constabularies. They’ve a hotline to the incident room they can call anytime. They’ve been told it’s not in their interest to go public in case this is criminal abduction or an incidence of terrorist hostage taking.’
‘But it’s neither of those,’ Ruthie said.
McClain nodded. ‘You’re right. There’d have been contact by now. And so we won’t be able to keep a lid on it for much longer. The families will want to feel like they’re doing something. Going public is the most obvious option.’
‘Be careful on New Hope.’
‘One of McIntyre’s Chronicle staffers went on the expedition in ’10. He took to calling it No Hope talking to newsroom colleagues before he left. He was one of those who never came back. I’ll be as careful as I can be.’
He hadn’t returned the compliment by asking her what she intended to do next and she was glad of that. She would have had to lie and Ruthie hated deception. But she was going to try to solve the mystery of the writer group disappearance. She was going to find out everything she could about the expedition of six years ago and see how those facts and suppositions linked to Dennis Thorpe. She suspected there was a link and she intended to find it. She’d almost gone, hadn’t she? And if she had done, she’d be as dead as she was sure the others, who had gone, certainly were.
She didn’t think sniffer dogs and forensics teams would solve this latest mystery. She nurtured a growing suspicion that it was linked to earlier events. The police would be methodical and painstaking and if they uncovered no clues, they would lean in the end towards the rationality of their rogue supertanker wake just engulfing the group. It made physical sense and wrapped things up quite neatly.
Instinct told Ruthie that the truth was darker and less mundane. She hadn’t bonde
d with any of the lost party – whether through lack of time or just disinclination – and she’d told McClain truthfully that she’d disliked Dennis Thorpe pretty much on sight. Where she’d lied to the detective was about the premonition, because she had endured one of those; a scary experience for which she now felt truly grateful. It was the real reason that in the end she hadn’t gone, a clutch of dismaying dread on the morning she’d fumbled open the letter confirming her inclusion on the retreat.
It had passed. But it had linked her to New Hope in a confidential way. It had forged a bond and made this new mystery somehow not just personal but intimate. And she felt a pressing obligation to do what she could to solve it. She might not be formally qualified to do that, but thought she might end up being better qualified in actuality than most.
To Nick McClain, now, she said, ‘I did my degree in history.’
‘Mine was psychology,’ he said.
‘You need to understand the past, it’s the key to the present and that’s true of everywhere you go.’
‘They didn’t teach that on any of the courses I’ve done with the force.’
‘It’s a fact, though.’
‘It’s why I sourced the Shanks footage,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I showed you that little apparition’
‘I’m glad you did.’
He sighed. He said, ‘There’s even more to you than meets the eye, Ruthie. And that’s really saying something.’
She’d drunk quite a lot over dinner and soon after McClain had chastely walked her home, dozed-off on her sofa in the darkness of her sitting room without meaning to. When she woke, in the small hours, she was dry mouthed and her eyes were adjusting their focus when she saw a wretched figure hanging above the ground to one side of her window, her side of its panes of glass, as though slyly half-concealing itself while it stayed rigidly still and studied her.
She gasped audibly and felt a shudder of fear before the apparition resolved itself into a curtain not properly pulled, just a distortion of fabric forming a shape made eerie by imagination and the night.
The Colony Trilogy Page 31