It had spooked her, though. It had brought the screen-shot on Nick McClain’s phone vividly back to her. She got into bed and then realised that the door of the wardrobe positioned against the wall she faced was slightly ajar. She couldn’t help wondering if tiny hands had pried it open and whether their owner was concealed inside un-breathing, its cold flesh pressed against her clothes, poised, lurking with a grin of blind delight on its unfinished face.
After a debate with herself probably shorter than it felt, she got up and pulled open the wardrobe door and looked and saw that her dresses and blouses hung innocently from their rails before closing the door again properly on them. She got back into bed. Nothing went bump in her night after that, but slumber came only reluctantly.
Her last conscious thought concerned Nick McClain’s assumption that she didn’t spend much on her clothes.
‘Cheeky bastard,’ she said, slurring into sleep.
Chapter Three
The most voluble of a subdued group on the expedition’s return from New Hope five years earlier had been a man named Phil Fortescue. Ruthie thought he’d be a more amenable place to start than Patrick Lassiter. Lassiter was a senior serving police officer and if she started questioning him, he’d link her name straight away to the vanished retreaters and tell DS McClain how inquisitive she’d become. And McClain would wonder why and she’d have to confess to her premonition and she wasn’t ready to do that yet.
At the time of the expedition, Fortescue had been the Keeper of Marine Artefacts at the Maritime Museum in Liverpool. He hadn’t been one of the experts originally recruited for the trip. He’d gone there late and separately with McIntyre himself. On his return he’d become a popular television pundit commenting on matters nautical. He’d fronted a six-part series entitled Ghost Ships, examining the enduring relationship between the supposedly supernatural and the sea.
He’d suffered a personal tragedy when the wife he’d first met on the expedition died young and unexpectedly. She was the telegenic virologist Jane Chambers, someone genuinely famous. She’d presented two really high-profile series, one of them on the Black Death. She’d written as well as presented her plague series and it had been a prize-winning hit all over the world. Ruthie had watched it when it was first broadcast and then again when it was repeated. She’d been impressed enough to buy the box-set for Father’s Day for her dad.
Jane Chambers was a much more celebrated media name than her husband ever became. She died of congenital heart failure in 2013 and after that, details concerning Phil Fortescue’s life and activities rather dried up. Ruthie thought that maybe he didn’t do anything, if his wife had left him plenty of money in her will. Then she discovered that she’d left everything to the daughter she’d had before divorcing her first husband.
He was no longer their Keeper of Marine Artefacts, but when she looked at their website, saw that he was still on the Advisory Board of the museum in Liverpool. There was an email address there for him and she wrote to him via that, saying she was interested in learning more about the New Hope Island expedition he’d participated in. She pressed ‘send’ at 11am, not confident at all that he would ever bother to respond. There’d been a suggestion of reclusiveness about the way he’d dropped so suddenly and completely out of public life.
To her surprise, he phoned her fifteen minutes later.
‘Did Patsy Lassiter put you onto me?’ There was a strong Scouse twang to his nasal voice. He sounded to her ears like John Lennon did in chat show clips of the dead Beatle on YouTube.
‘I’ve never spoken to Patrick Lassiter in my life,’ she said.
There was a silence through which she heard Phil Fortescue thinking. Then he said, ‘Does this have something to do with that idiot Dennis Thorpe?’
‘I was booked to go on his retreat.’
‘When is that?’
‘It’s coming up for a week ago.’
‘Jesus Christ, you mean they actually went?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘What happened to them?’
‘I’m not supposed to discuss it.’
‘Which pretty much answers the question,’ Fortescue said.
‘I’d like to speak to you personally,’ Ruthie said.
‘I don’t do meet, or greet.’
‘I know you’ve deliberately dropped out of public life.’
He chuckled at that, mirthlessly. He said, ‘I lost the only life I cared about. It wasn’t mine. It belonged to someone else until it was stolen. I’m telling you this because I don’t wish to be discourteous in refusing to see you. But I am refusing.’
‘Why was Thorpe so interested in New Hope Island?’
‘His interest was in a man called David Shanks. He was researching Shanks for a biography he intended to write. Or so he told me. Shanks was a much less savoury character than his legend suggests. I did warn Thorpe explicitly about that. Obviously he disregarded what I said.’
Ruthie swallowed. She said, ‘I’ve seen her. I’ve seen the girl from the footage filmed by Shanks. I’ve seen Seamus Ballantyne’s daughter.’
‘Don’t persist with this, Ms. Gillespie.’
‘Call me Ruthie, everyone does.’
‘I’m not everyone.’
‘Meet me for an hour. Please. I’ll come to Liverpool.’
‘What makes you think I’m in Liverpool?’
‘Where are you?’
‘I’m in Pompey.’
‘I’m in Ventnor. It’s only a ferry ride away. People commute. What are you doing in Portsmouth?’
‘Restoration work on the Old Naval Dockyard. It’s a consultancy job. I’ve a living to earn.’
‘I could be there in less than two hours.’
‘I’ve warned you about persistence. You’re flirting with something very dangerous.’
‘I know I sound pushy, Mr. Fortescue, for which I apologise. I don’t wish to intrude on your grief. I don’t want to invade your privacy. But I’m begging for an hour of your time.’
He was so quiet, for so long, she thought the connection severed. Then he said, ‘There’s a pub in the Old Town, on the quay, it’s called The Spice Island.’
She closed her eyes and smiled. ‘I know it,’ she said.
‘I’m early-forties, quite tall and slim with longish wavy hair. Used to be auburn, since New Hope it’s mostly turned grey.’
‘I’ve got black shoulder-length hair which I wear in a fringe,’ Ruthie said. ‘I’ve brown eyes and a pale complexion and my arms are tattooed.’
‘You won’t be alone in that, in a navy town,’ Fortescue said.
‘Mostly I wear black clothes.’ Cheap black clothes, she thought. ‘I could send you a selfie?’
‘No need,’ he said, ‘we’ll find one another. I’ll see you there at a quarter to six tonight. Be punctual, Ms. Gillespie. Your 60 minutes is counting down from 5.45 on the dot.’
Patrick Lassiter had taken DS Nick McClain’s call on his personal mobile and on his own time spending a week’s leave from duty with his wife in the West Country. He’d been in Swanage in Dorset, enjoying the sunny weather on the Jurassic Coast, the Needles of the Isle of Wight visible from the beach there, rising in the distance like the white spires of some great cathedral otherwise engulfed by the sea.
He hadn’t thought to mention that he was on his own time, much less labour the point. He was a man who tended to be patient and cheerful these days, counting his many blessings. Besides, he’d always admired the Scots and the young detective sergeant was one of those promising officers who matched punctiliousness with brains. McClain would join the dots where necessary and where required he’d bite and wouldn’t let go. That winning combination of attributes would take him far, if New Hope Island didn’t first take him down.
Lassiter had hoped warily that the place was now benign. He’d hoped the group on the creative writing retreat had come to no genuine harm and had just sailed off to some other rock in the Hebrides out of boredom or a misplaced sense of ad
venture. Wireless communication was erratic in that part of the world and cellular phones simply didn’t work at all. Dennis Thorpe was a novelist though, an armchair explorer ignorant of the fundamental rule that you stayed in touch and relayed your location whenever it changed in an environment that could turn hostile quickly and without warning.
It was more than possible that on a sunny June day, with the sky clear and the sea blue and tranquil, the group had boarded the boat that had got them there and set a course for somewhere else. You couldn’t see neighbouring islands from New Hope, but they weren’t all that far away in a fast craft with a powerful outboard in calm weather. You’d only really need a compass and a chart to reach one of those.
In the hilltop town of Shaftesbury, only a day on from their Swanage idyll, for Lassiter and his wife Alice, that hope was proven to be the worst kind of wishful thinking.
Shaftesbury was big on antiques. They were in a cluttered arcade on Bell Street full of shelves and cabinets crowded with artefacts from the past. It was midday and an hour after the phone conversation Lassiter didn’t yet know had taken place between Phil Fortescue and Ruthie Gillespie.
He’d separated from Alice, she was off somewhere in a different room or gallery. He was looking at an unintentionally camp Victorian painting of a Viking chieftain and his wife aboard their long-ship. The chieftain was decked out in a fur ensemble that would have done Liberace proud at his Las Vegas residency peak. The wife, demurely pretty, strapped and girdled like a bondage fetishist, had a hand clamped on her seated husband’s bare and substantial thigh. Lassiter was grinning, studying this depiction, wondering what on earth could have been going on in its painter’s mind, when he heard his own wife scream.
He was at her side in seconds, following the sound. She was as pale as ivory and she was shaking. A pair of silver cufflinks had fallen to the floor at her feet. They were each set with a single ruby and he supposed she must have dropped them. She was struggling to look at him, but didn’t seem to have any control over any of her facial muscles or nerves. Her mouth hung agape and he wondered, with a sudden gut-punch of dread, whether his wife was suffering a stroke.
Alice tried to speak, but the sound made by her throat was choked and incoherent and then her eyes fluttered towards the ceiling and she slid down in a dead faint and her husband deftly caught her, his grip solid and sure, knowing all at once what had provoked this sudden collapse.
He picked her up and carried her outside. She was quite small and slender and light, no burden at all really and everything in the world that was precious to him. There were benches on a patch of ornamental garden fronting Shaftesbury’s public library just a short walk down the road. He carried her there and laid her along one of the benches, careful that she was positioned so that her face wouldn’t be in the glare of the strengthening sun when she opened her eyes, her head supported by the improvised pillow of his rolled jacket.
He saw a curtain twitch at a window on the opposite side of the road. The library’s garden would be tended by volunteers, he supposed. And one of them, opposite, was either being vigilant or vigilante, depending on what was required. Lassiter could see the outline behind net curtain of an inquisitive female head, pecking at the glass, hair stiffly frosted. He didn’t think either of the people in the garden now looked like potential vandals. Maybe the sentinel at the window thought Alice passed-out drunk. He turned his attention back to his wife.
He’d met her more than a decade earlier as a detective on the Met’s Murder Squad. She was a distinguished psychiatrist, but that wasn’t why they’d met. They’d met because she’d possessed a psychic gift. She’d come to New Scotland Yard reluctantly, insights into a killer’s identity having rudely gatecrashed her mind. She’d done it twice and on both occasions provided Lassiter, heading up those investigations, with information vital to cases he didn’t think they would otherwise have cracked.
Their relationship had been an uneasy and complex one because only violent death had brought them together and because she knew about his losing battle with drink. She’d been apt to make suggestions as to how he could deal with that, which he’d resented, however tactfully they were put. In common with most alcoholics, he thought he’d been clever at keeping his addiction a secret. Alice Lang was the proof he hadn’t been.
Their romance had begun in the run-up to the New Hope expedition. He’d lost his reputation and career by then and having given up on himself, naturally considered he had nothing to offer any woman. Alice had her own contrasting opinion about that and one afternoon, having invited him to her house, she acted upon it quite decisively.
She’d lost any hint of psychic insight in the aftermath of the expedition. She thought this emphatic proof of her theory about its purpose. Thus she was able to visit museums and great country houses. Thus she was able to endure the clutter of antique shops without secrets and sensations from some random stranger’s past careening uninvited through her mind.
Until today, Lassiter thought, looking at her lovely, sleeping face, until handling those cufflinks.
Alice woke about 20 minutes later and sat up without a word and he put an arm around her and walked her to the Costa coffee shop back in the direction of the town’s high street. They had to pass the antiques arcade to get there and did so having crossed to the other side of the road. Lassiter glanced at the large old enamelled sign showing a grinning Mr. Punch hung above the pavement outside it. Alice stared rigidly ahead. Neither of them spoke to one another until they were seated at a table outside Costa with their drinks.
Alice dabbed at tears with her napkin.
Lassiter sipped coffee and said, ‘It’s back. Isn’t it?’
‘I thought they’d be a nice surprise for your birthday.’ She said. ‘Not your main present, obviously, just a little something that’d be, I don’t know, unique and personal.’ She was screwing the napkin between her hands, shredding it, unaware he thought of doing so, biting her bottom lip.
He reached out and stilled her hands between his. He said, ‘What did you see?’
‘He was given the cufflinks when he passed Matriculation at Winchester School in the summer of 1916. They were a gift from his mother. He was meant to go to Oxford in October but he volunteered to fight. His parents were as proud as they were angry about that, I think. He was blown to pieces by a shrapnel shell on the Ypres Salient one night in September of the following year. I saw his death.’
‘Jesus.’
Alice smiled, blinking through tears. She sniffed. ‘Jesus has nothing to do with it,’ she said.
Lassiter heard his phone tremble silently in his pocket against his chest. He took it out and saw DS McClain’s number on the display. He hesitated with the phone vibrating in in his hand. To Alice, he said, ‘I have to take this.’
‘Sorry to bother you again, Commander,’ said McClain.
‘Don’t worry about that, lad. Call it keeping me in the loop.’ He had the growing sense that there was more to it than that, though. The return to Alice of the gift New Hope had cost her seemed ominously timed.
‘One of Thorpe’s retreaters has an interesting past.’
Had, Lassiter thought, grimly. He said, ‘Where are you?’
‘I’m on an Edinburgh-bound express.’
‘I suppose trains are cheaper than flying.’
‘Also more scenic,’ McClain said.
Lassiter smiled to himself, remembering the days when coppers travelling on trains tended to do so exclusively holed-up in the bar. Those days were gone. McClain would have his laptop fully fired up, going through case notes, probably organising conference calls.
‘Freddie Boyle – a journalist attending the course - was someone else first. He was given a new identity.’
‘Witness protection?’
‘He didn’t need protection. If anything people needed protecting from him. He was lethal, one of those assassination squad volunteers the SAS ran in the early 1970s in Belfast.’
‘I don’t think
they were formally called assassination squads. And it was actually MI5 that ran them.’
‘Which is kind of splitting hairs,’ McClain said.
‘So he’s a man in his 60s now,’ Lassiter said.
‘He’s a man in his 60s about as well-trained, tough and resourceful as they come. I’ve read the file on what he did in the Province, nerves of steel and more front than Blackpool. He’d go down hard and fighting. And I don’t think he’d be frightened of ghosts.’
‘What did your witness make of him?’
‘Said he was the most likeable and interesting member of the group and the one with the most promising idea for a book.’
‘She’s too good natured.’
‘That’s the least of her attributes.’
’You haven’t fallen for her?’
McClain didn’t reply.
Lassiter’s question had been posed in jest, but some silences were eloquent. He said, ‘Bloody hell, you have.’
‘I’m on the brink.’
‘Be careful, son. This is an ongoing investigation and she’s a material witness. That’s the brink of a precipice.’
Lassiter didn’t think that Freddie Boyle’s book would ever get written. He’d got up and wandered a few feet away from their table on speaking to McClain. From where he stood, he could see the vista before and below him of Blackmore Vale, its field patchwork pretty and verdant, the view all that was most seductive about rural England. It was redolent of scrumpy from tapped barrels and tales written by Thomas Hardy and songs sung by Lisa Knapp and Kate Rusby. He glanced back to where Alice sat and thought about New Hope, the granite redoubt of dark secrets in its wilderness of cold Atlantic water. And he shuddered, knowing the story wasn’t over, as he’d ardently hoped and believed it to be.
Chapter Four
She knew him straight away. His tall figure was folded into a chair at one of the tables overlooking the harbour. He was staring out towards one of the Solent’s sea forts and looked deeply preoccupied. She studied him for a moment, before he saw her. There were lines etched to either side of his mouth and a spread to either edge of them of crows-feet gave his eyes a rugged, grown-up appeal. He’d described himself as slim but he wasn’t slight. He wasn’t wearing a jacket, sitting there in the sun. His T-shirt was taut over his pectoral muscles and there was a veined, vascular hardness to his biceps and forearms.
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