He hadn’t been lying about his hair. It was long and loose and thickly ravaged by grey. He’d aged a decade in the three years since she’d seen his last, puny, slightly vapid television appearance. Life was paradoxical. Phil Fortescue had become powerfully attractive, which he hadn’t been then and which wouldn’t have been readily predictable. Ruthie supposed a gym habit could be therapeutic, but then almost everything she knew about physical exercise was theoretical.
He stood to greet her. He didn’t offer to buy her a drink because she’d carried a pint of lager through with her, out of the pub. He had a hand-pulled pint of something dark in front of him, the glass three-quarters full.
They shook hands and sat down together and she slid her cigarettes onto the table and studied his expression and he didn’t look horrified. He was from Liverpool, of course and there were more smokers statistically in the north of England. They were consequently more tolerant of the habit, or so Ruthie told herself.
He said, ‘What do you know about what happened on New Hope?’
‘An entire community disappeared. It’s like the Marie Celeste, only on a bigger scale and on land. Some people think that plague killed them. Most seem to think the likeliest explanation is alien abduction. That happened early in the 19th century.
‘Then in the 1930s a crofter named Shanks filmed something there, an apparition, something scary and inexplicable. And six years ago an expedition went there to solve the original mystery and not all of them came back. You were one of those that did.’
Fortescue nodded, distractedly. He seemed to have a problem with eye-contact. She thought that perhaps he was shy, unless he was just disinterested. He said, ‘What do you know about the McIntyre expedition?’
Ruthie took a cigarette from her pack. He didn’t react, so she lit it. She said, ‘There was an awful lot of publicity at the time, but to be honest, it rather passed me by. I‘m a children’s author, now. Back then I was working on the galley proofs of my debut book. The deadline was tight and an awful lot depended on me getting it right.’
He frowned. ‘What did you do before?’
‘I was the singer in a band.’
‘I’ve never heard of you.’
‘Exactly,’ Ruthie said. She blew out smoke. ‘It was make-or-break with that first book, so as I say, the New Hope business rather passed me by.’
He looked at her properly for the first time and smiled. He said, ‘You must have a God-awful voice, Ruthie.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Looking like you do and failing despite it.’
‘I’d debate whether that’s a sexist remark or not but haven’t the time, with only 55 minutes left, Mr. Fortescue. What happened to you on New Hope? What killed your colleagues there?’
‘Please call me Phil.’
‘Tell me something significant, Phil,’ she said. ‘And there’s something you haven’t thought of.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It could just have been the songs.’
A young woman walked out of the pub and strode directly to their table. She was blonde and more of a girl than a woman, really. Because he was facing the harbour, Fortescue had his back to her and was unaware of her approach until she got there. When she did, she draped her arms over his shoulders onto his chest and kissed him on the cheek.
Fortescue reached up without looking and smiled and squeezed her hands in his and Ruthie felt a sick stomach plunge of betrayal at how she’d been lulled so easily into seeing this dirty old lothario as suffering and good.
‘Daddo,’ the girl said. Then to Ruthie, lifting her eyes, ‘I’m Edie Chambers. I read a couple of your books a few years ago and in the photo on the book jackets you’ve got this femme fatale thing going on. I’m a bit protective of my step-dad. But you look okay, actually. So I’m going back inside.’ She kissed Fortescue again, this time on the top of his head, ruffling his hair.
When she’d gone, Ruthie said, ‘That girl adores you.’
‘She’s the reason I’m alive.’
‘What’s she doing here?’
‘She’s 19 and youth employment’s scarce and even internships are hard to come by. Where you can, you should help the people close to you.’
‘I couldn’t agree more.’
‘So she’s been working for me. She starts at uni in October. From next week she’s shadowing the features journalist Lucy Church on the Chronicle for a fortnight.’
‘I’ve heard of Lucy Church. She was on your expedition back in ’10.’
He nodded. ‘Edie will be inside having a drink with some of the people we’re working with. She makes friends easily. I met Edie, sort of, even before I met her mum. She was why I met her mum. I’m trying here to work out what’s relevant and what’s not. To work out whether I should help you or whether that’ll just put you in danger.’
Ruthie put out her cigarette in the ashtray on their table.
‘Do you ever feel guilty about that?’ asked Fortescue, gesturing towards the ashtray.
‘Never about the one I’ve just smoked, only ever about the one I’m about to. But there are coping mechanisms, guilt-wise.’
‘You’d have been a nightmare for Alan Carr.’
‘I’m all over Alan Carr. Talk to me about New Hope.’
‘It’s an unhappy place, stark and isolated and not due a tourist boom any time soon.’
‘Is it dangerous?’
‘Not any more, I don’t think, beyond the natural hazards.’
‘What about the thing Shanks filmed?’
‘Patsy Lassiter’s your authority on Shanks and the film, since he located it. Only he’s Commander Lassiter these days. You’d reach him at New Scotland Yard.’ Ruthie didn’t let on that she already knew this, and had decided against contacting Lassiter.
‘Did you see it there?’
‘It’s supposedly the ghost of Rachel Ballantyne, only child to Seamus, who died of diphtheria at 10. None of us who came back saw it there and my own feeling is that a ghost can’t physically harm you.’
Ruthie had remembered something. It had slipped unexpectedly into her mind. She took a notebook and pen from her pocket and jotted down the memory unless it slipped out again. She thought it might be important.
‘Are there any other ghosts on the island?’ she asked.
‘A psychic went there as part of the expedition,’ Fortescue said. ‘She thought the spirit of David Shanks still present at the cottage he built there. She was convinced of it. So were both the two people who visited the cottage with her.’
‘There’s loads you’re not telling me here.’
‘Shanks is the key to Thorpe’s interest in the island. He badgered me about it in the run-up to your group’s departure – kept emailing me. I didn’t reply after the first acknowledgment, done as a courtesy, because I didn’t buy the Shanks biography story. Lassiter’s the authority on Shanks. But I do know he was thrown out of a Cornish coastal commune in the 1950s. They were loosely pagan, proto-hippies, really. His appetite for black magic got a bit much for them.’
‘You think Thorpe could be a disciple of Shanks?’
‘David Shanks leapt to his death from a cliff-top in County Clare 60 years ago.’
‘Why did Shanks choose to settle on New Hope?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does. Ask Patsy Lassiter.’
‘Didn’t Dennis Thorpe approach Commander Lassiter? It would have seemed the obvious thing to do, rather than bothering you.’
‘Not everyone is comfortable with police officers.’
‘The least comfortable with them being people with something to hide,’ Ruthie said.
‘So why didn’t you go?’
‘I had a premonition, Professor Fortescue.’
He looked at her alertly, his interest finally piqued. He said, ‘Doom came knocking at your door?’
‘It wasn’t funny.’
Fortescue sipped from his drink. He contemplated the sea, his view of the wat
er and sky, the harbour entrance, the floating vessels, the sullen, distant bulk of the sea forts. He put down his glass. He looked at Ruthie directly, a man with features hewn into handsomeness by imponderable loss. He said, ‘Fate played a huge part in my involvement with New Hope. There were times when I felt no more free will with it all than a strung puppet would have. I thought it had finished with me, but might be mistaken in that.’
She felt sorry to have brought him to this. Just to lighten the tone, she said, ‘Your point?’
‘It hasn’t finished with me, Ruthie, but it sounds like it’s only just started with you.’
‘That’s precisely why I’ve come to see you. Did you experience anything out of the ordinary on New Hope?’
‘Everything was,’ he said. ‘But I think you mean did anything involving magic occur there and the answer is that it did.’
She was on the ferry on the Solent with Portsmouth Harbour diminishing at the stern as dusk descended when she remembered the note she had written to herself at their table outside The Spice Island. She took out her phone and rang DS McClain.
‘I think the Reverend Mabel Farrow and Jennifer Spring might have known one another before joining Thorpe’s retreaters,’ she said.
‘Go on.’
‘Mabel called Jennifer ‘Jenn’, whereas she very specifically introduced herself as Jennifer to the group. I only heard her do it once and thought it just one of those happy-clappy trendy vicar liberties the Anglican clergy are prone to taking. But then when Mabel got a round in at the Flask in Hampstead that evening, she brought Jennifer back a bottle of Mexican beer with a slice of lime wedged in the neck. No glass.’
‘What’s odd about that?’
‘I didn’t hear her ask Jennifer what she wanted. She just presumed. And she just presumed Jennifer drank her beer directly from the bottle in preference to using a glass.’
‘That’s too many presumptions.’
‘It is with strangers. If they did know one another, why were they covering up the fact?’
‘When did this come back to you?’
‘It was earlier this evening when I saw a girl in a pub drinking a beer directly from the bottle. I remembered the oddness of it then. It only became odd in my memory. How weird is that?’
‘It’s how deductive reasoning sometimes works. It’s not dissimilar to the creative process. Have you ever started a story without knowing the ending?’
‘I do that every time.’
‘But you never get stuck for an ending.’
‘Well, I haven’t so far.’
‘The next chapter always occurs to you.’
‘When are you scheduled to go back to New Hope?’ asked Ruthie.
‘I’m going tomorrow, early, with the death dogs.’
‘Ugh. Take care, Nick.’
‘Any more insights, Ruthie, call me. You’ve an instinct for this.’
She ended the call. She hadn’t told the detective sergeant that the pub had been The Spice Island or who she’d met there or that the person drinking beer directly from the bottle was Edie Chambers. She liked the Scottish police officer and she wanted to help him in his investigation as far as she was able to. She was, after all, the nearest thing he had to a witness. But she also believed that women without one or two important secrets of their own lacked substance. And that conviction made her rather good at keeping them. She’d tell him eventually about her retreat premonition. It wouldn’t help at all with his investigation but the lie would be on her conscience until the moment she got it off.
Her mind took her back to The Spice Island and to the moment just before she’d departed Phil Fortescue’s company. He’d commented on her wristwatch.
‘It’s a 1969 Rolex Air King,’ she told him.
‘You’re into your watches?’
‘In the trade, they’ll tell you the Air King is the entry-level Rolex. I just like its classic simplicity. Probably the most minimalist of their watches is the Explorer 1, which doesn’t even have a date function. But this is nicely understated.’
‘You sound like Patrick Bateman.’
‘What I sound like is a geek. I’m into watches. Only watches, all my jewellery’s junk. This cost me just under a grand on eBay and is the single most valuable thing I own.’
He reached into the canvas bag looped around the back of his chair and his hand came out holding something flat with rounded sides the lowering sun caught and burnished even before it left his grip as he placed it on the table. She saw the blued enamel hands and flawless ceramic face of an old silver pocket watch. Then she saw from the inscription on the dial that it was a Breguet. She whistled and held out her hand to pick it up and hesitated.
Fortescue shrugged, as if to say be my guest.
It was showing the correct time and ticked determinedly in her palm. The metal was cold and heavy and smooth. It was a beautifully fashioned piece but once she’d picked it up, she couldn’t wait to put it down again. It felt so loathsome to the touch, she almost dropped it. When she’d placed it back on the table top she wiped her hand on the thigh of her jeans.
‘It belonged to Seamus Ballantyne,’ Fortescue said. ‘He would have used it to help him navigate accurately when he was master of the slave vessel Andromeda. His former wife bequeathed a trunk of his possessions to the museum in Liverpool after their divorce and his departure for New Hope. He’d left it behind, with his old life. It never went to the island.’
‘Why’ve you got it?’
‘Extended loan. The stuff from Ballantyne’s chest is never exhibited. Collectively, it poses health problems in the sense that it seems to inflict bad luck.’
‘Why do you carry it?’
‘After Jane’s death I felt inured to bad luck. What could be worse? And I needed a reminder at my lowest that I’d once accomplished something requiring courage and will, since I’d be in need of those qualities again.’
‘Should you be winding it, though? That wears the mechanism and it’s a valuable antique.’
‘I’ve never wound or set it. All the time I’ve had it, it’s never run down or slowed.’
Ruthie looked at the watch. She could hear its tick, steady, relentless and strong. ‘Perpetual motion’s impossible,’ she said.
‘According to the physicists it is, Ruthie, who were men when proving that, and so merely human.’
Chapter Five
His hide was sited at the edge of the shore, above the tideline, camouflaged by pebbles and surrounded by shingle, scraped from the sand under the shingle, and he knew if he didn’t risk leaving it soon it would likely become his tomb. His ceiling or roof was a Kevlar panel he’d found amid the remnants of the camp the expeditionaries had briefly occupied six years earlier. That was near the little harbour, at the opposite end of the island from the crofter’s cottage built by the bohemian wanderer and former war hero David Shanks.
He owed this information to Dennis Thorpe. In those first few days of their retreat to New Hope, Thorpe had acted like a knowledgeable guide. He’d shown them the settlement too below the heights at the island’s centre. It was walled and sinister, with its squat hovels and windowless church. The wind withered and curdled in banshee whispers through its barren spaces. There was the sense too of being slyly and malevolently watched the whole time they were there. Terry had put this down half to imagination and half to the sixth sense that had saved his life a dozen times during the early years of the Troubles on his tours of duty in the Province.
His food or drink had been spiked, possibly with Rohypnol, the date-rape drug, possibly with some even stronger sedative. They’d been drinking around a campfire, an atmospheric touch on a balmy night, light despite the late hour.
Thorpe had led the singing; sea-shanties with a Celtic or Cornish character sung in a strong tenor voice, his lean, boyish frame clad in corduroy and tweed, patched and darned. He was like someone from another era with his briar pipe and floppy quiff and his mental store of old folk ditties to follow as they passed ar
ound flagons of cider and ale and he picked chords nimbly on the ukulele he had brought.
Their host had been generous in plying them with the spiked booze, Terry now realised, occupying the intervals between songs with snatches of rural poetry delivered with a shy smile suggesting that he was quoting stanzas he’d written himself. He’d lulled them, hadn’t he, with his soft accent and air of scholarly accomplishment? Terry no longer believed Dennis Thorpe had written a word of the lines he’d quoted. He’d learned them by heart as part of his skilful routine. It had been nothing more than patter.
Terry had crashed out and then woken in the one building still intact at the old expedition compound. It was the comms room; ironic, because communication with anyone beyond the island’s boundaries was impossible. They just didn’t possess the necessary hardware.
He woke handcuffed. If nylon ties had been used to bind him, he’d have been fucked. But he was cuffed behind his back and his feet were tightly bound at the ankles by a well-knotted length of the thickness of rope people used for their washing lines. The floor was strewn with six-year-old souvenir litter. He began to search painstakingly, unaware of how much time he had to work with but refusing to panic and hasten the search because if he did that, he was guaranteed to find bugger-all.
He was remembering all this as Terry. For the length of the life left to him, he would never again think a single thought or breathe another word as Freddie Boyle. RIP Freddie, he thought. You’ll be sadly missed by all who knew you, barring me, of course.
Eventually, among the discarded screws and bolts and brackets and cone shaped water cooler cups, his scrabbling fingers found a pin. It was the sort that might be used to mount a chart on corkboard and he thought six years earlier, it probably had done. It took him eight minutes after that to pick the lock blind and get the cuffs off. Back in the day he’d have done it in five but at least he’d retained the knack, he thought, discovering they hadn’t bothered to secure the door because it was fat and jovial Freddie Boyle they were dealing with and they’d thought him too hapless ever to escape the secure manner in which they’d trussed him up.
The Colony Trilogy Page 33