He had a ferry to catch and then a drive to Inverness once he reached the mainland and the singular charms of Ryan Air flying from there to Limmerick. The Garda had been considerate enough to book him a B&B in Liscannor with a clutch of five star ratings on the Trip Advisor website. He’d phoned ahead to warn them he’d probably not arrive until well after midnight and they’d told him where to find a hidden key. It wasn’t a particularly long distance to go but accomplishing it was a bit of a slog.
He had a hunch it would be worth it, though. He would arrive in Liscannor an innocent, but suspected that by the time of his departure, he’d know a lot more about the enigma of Dennis Thorpe’s missing retreat than he did right now.
Fortescue had dinner with Edie Chambers. They’d done that most nights since their arrival in Portsmouth three weeks earlier. She’d been 14 when they first met and he thought that in every way he could think of, she had matured wonderfully. It was the greatest consolation in his otherwise diminished life.
He thought they must look a strange pair to anyone observing them. Edie was willowy and blonde and vital. And she wore youth like a charm. She was more obviously glamorous than her mother had been; not brazen in any way, just confident and poised. He considered this hauteur a consequence of the ordeal she’d endured at 14; the encounter with something other-worldly that had brought them, improbably, together. She’d emerged from that experience the stronger. Usually, she was a bubbly presence at the table, witty and chatty. He thought her uncharacteristically quiet tonight.
She took a sip of wine and looked directly at him. She said, ‘If you let the past define you, you give yourself no chance at all of a future worth having.’
‘Did you get that from a self-help book?’
‘It’s a truism, Phil. It’s fucking obvious.’
She only ever called him Phil when she was being serious. He said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t swear like that.’
‘You’re so frustratingly stubborn. That woman fancies the pants off you.’
‘What woman?’
‘Phil. Give me a break.’
‘She’s ten years younger than I am.’
‘So? That hardly makes you a dirty old man.’
‘I wouldn’t survive the passive smoking.’
‘It’s two years since you’ve had any kind of life. She’s gorgeous and I’ll bet she’s fun. She’s exactly what you need.’
‘She’d have me listening to records by The Cure.’
‘That’s a small price to pay. I’m not suggesting you stake your entire romantic future on someone you’ve met once. But you were attracted to one another. The chemistry was obvious. All I’m saying is it wouldn’t hurt to give her a call and invite her out.’
‘I’ll give it some thought.’
‘That means you won’t. Christ, Phil, you think I don’t know you?’
‘She’s out of my league.’
‘You thought that about mum. You made her the happiest I’d ever known her. You gave her back all the self-worth she thought she’d lost for good.’
Fortescue’s hands were on the table top, fists clenched to either side of his neglected plate. Edie reached out and covered them with hers and squeezed his knuckles tenderly. She loved this man, who had responded to her own urgent distress call and then saved her mother’s life and then given her mum contentment.
She said, ‘Talking about mum in the past tense sounds callous to you but it’s just facing the facts. She’ll always live in my heart and memory, just as I know she does in yours. But you can’t go on not living as a consequence of her death. It’s just a waste and she’d agree with that and you know she would.’
Fortescue managed a smile. He repeated, ‘Ruthie Gillespie’s out of my league.’
Edie smiled back at him and raised an eyebrow. ‘I’d let her be the judge of that,’ she said. She took back her hands and reached for her phone. ‘What were her band called?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘I’ll bet they’re on YouTube.’
‘We don’t know what they were called.’
‘I’ll Google her,’ Edie said. ‘I’m shameless where curiosity’s concerned.’
Fortescue smiled, properly this time, watching her stab fingers at her phone, shaking his head. It was true. She was shameless when it came to satisfying her curiosity. And when she wanted to know anything important, he remained almost always her first port of call. He was grateful for this.
‘There,’ she said, after some more prodding and scrolling. She held out the phone and there was Ruthie Gillespie on the screen, spot-lit somewhere cavernous, thin boys in black flanking her, playing their instruments, the band against a dark, velvety backdrop. There was no sound to the film, which Fortescue thought probably a blessing.
She was dancing as she sang and moving with a lithe grace to the silent rhythm of the song. She didn’t truthfully look any younger than she had the previous evening, in this former life. She looked the same, her strong features framed by the black, silky geometry of her hair. Crimson lipstick shaped her mouth and her brown eyes looked almost black, glittering when she dropped the sombre performer act for just a moment, flashing a sly smile at her guitarist.
Edie came around to his side of the table and bent her knees in a half crouch beside him to see, reaching an arm across his shoulder.
‘She certainly looks the part,’ Fortescue said.
Edie slipped her arm from his shoulder and dug her elbow hard into his ribs.
‘Ouch!’
‘Say what you’re really thinking.’
‘What I’m really thinking is the same thing I was thinking when I met her early yesterday evening. She’s the first woman I’ve looked at since your mother. At least, she’s the first I’ve really noticed since your mum. And I liked her immediately.’
‘That’s better. The truth will always find you out, so you’re better off just fessing up and having done.’
‘That’s terrible syntax.’
‘Syntax isn’t the point. Don’t change the subject.’
‘I’m telling you, she’s out of my league.’
‘You’re looking for another elbow.’
On the screen, the song finished and the frame froze and Edie switched off her phone.
‘Okay, I’ll call her,’ Fortescue said. ‘I promise I will.’
Edie kissed him on the cheek and went and sat back down and picked up her dessert menu with a grin on her face.
‘What are you going to have?’
‘I fancy the rhubarb pie with ice-cream and whipped cream.’
‘Sounds delicious, I might have that myself.’
‘No dessert for you, Daddo. Ruthie Gillespie wouldn’t date a fat bloke.’
Chapter Nine
They knocked on the guest house door at 8 o’clock the following morning. They were the Chief Superintendent of the Clare police and the Archbishop of the Diocese. They introduced themselves to McClain without undue fuss or ceremony and then suggested he accompany them to a meeting they’d scheduled without prior notice at Ennis, the county town. McClain excused himself only for long enough to gulp down what remained in his mug of breakfast coffee and to grab his jacket from his room. Five minutes after that they were doing 60 in a Daimler with a police driver at the wheel and a flashing light on its roof.
The Archbishop sat up front with the driver. In the rear seats the Chief Super asked to be brought up to speed on McClain’s investigation. McClain was depressingly brief. At least, his brevity depressed him, demonstrating how light on facts and long on speculation he was.
‘Let’s dispense with the formalities, since you’ve no jurisdiction here and I’ve none in Great Britain,’ the Chief Super said. ‘You’ll call me O’Casey and if I may, I’ll call you Rattigan.’
‘And I’m Wilde,’ the Archbishop said jovially from the front passenger seat.
‘And none of today is going to happen and when it has, it never did,’ O’Casey said, ‘if you get my drift?’
&n
bsp; ‘We’re all playwrights,’ McCain said, happy to play along even if Terence Rattigan had been an Englishman.
‘Distinguished playwrights,’ said Wilde.
‘You’re going to give me information which you think might help with my investigation but none of that information is attributable. I never came here and I never met either of you.’
‘You’re a bright boy and you’ll go far,’ O’Casey said.
‘I already have,’ he said, ‘I wrote The Deep Blue Sea.’
They both chuckled, dutifully. It was a weak joke aimed only at proving that he’d heard of Terrence Rattigan.
McClain already knew that these were shrewd companions he was sharing the car with. They were very senior in their respective roles. They were the elite in their contrasting worlds and neither would have got to where he was either through undue influence or accident.
O’Casey said, ‘You say you’ve seen the Shanks film?’
‘Yes, a couple of days ago.’
‘I envy you that. It’s long intrigued me.’
‘It’s an ordeal to watch.’
‘So you thought it genuine?’
McClain took out his phone and brought up the screen shot. He offered the phone to O’Casey, who took it and raised an eyebrow. He studied the image for several seconds and so McClain thought his hand remarkably steady as he handed the phone on to Wilde
Wilde too studied it. ‘Mary, Mother of God,’ he said. And when he’d reached back to return the phone to McClain he crossed himself and then kissed the wooden crucifix worn hung against his chest.
They hurtled along a narrow, west of Ireland, road. Sunlight flashed through the tinted glass from verdant summer fields. Their driver drove like someone expertly schooled at high speed pursuit. The smell of leather rose like the whiff of luxury from the cabin’s deep upholstery. Walnut gleamed on the dashboard. Where exposed, his skin felt dry and cool with an air-conditioned chill. McClain felt nervous, but not intimidated. It was the rare moments like this, he thought, that made all the routine stuff seem worthwhile.
The driver parked the car in a private bay in an underground car park and then got out without comment and closed his door firmly behind him, walking away without a word or a backward glance.
Wilde turned and said to McClain, ‘You are shortly to meet a penitent. This woman went to her parish priest six weeks ago to confess to some terrible sins. Such was the gravity of her crimes against God and her fellow man, he felt unable to grant her absolution. He suggested that forgiveness could only come if she proved her remorse by making a full police confession and accepting the consequences if brought before a criminal court.
‘She didn’t do that at first. Instead she came to me. On hearing her confession, made a second time in a matter of days, I felt I could in all conscience no more absolve her than had my humble brother in faith. I advised her, as he did, to make a clean breast of things with a senior Garda officer. I suggested she go all the way to the top, to Mr. O’Casey here. And then, because we’re old friends, without naming the woman, I telephoned Mr. O’Casey so he’d have fair warning and time to prepare for what I expected was shortly to come.’
O’Casey said, ‘May I ask you, Mr. Rattigan, where you stand on the subject of the occult?’
McClain thought about this. He said, ‘When I saw the Shanks film I had no doubt that it was genuine. I've been aware of the reputation of New Hope since I first heard about it as a schoolboy. I think the fairest way to put it would be to say that I keep an open mind. I’m neither predisposed to believe, nor to be overly cynical. I met someone only the other day who claimed to have had a recent paranormal experience. I didn’t feel any inclination to laugh at her.’
That person was Ruthie Gillespie and this was true, but there had been a mitigating factor. He had wanted her to like him. He didn’t think he’d have laughed anyway. She’d sounded both convincing and convinced.
O’Casey said, ‘The woman you’re about to meet was a lover of Dennis Thorpe. So was Jennifer Spring and so was Mabel Farrow, better known to us as Patricia Anderson. Apparently this physical intimacy was a necessary prerequisite for what they were trying to accomplish. It bonded them in flesh and endowed them with collective power. Or so they believed. It unlocked the potential for the mischief they were trying to get up to.’
‘I don’t think mischief is quite the word,’ Wilde said.
O’Casey frowned. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s wholly inadequate, and quite unforgivable, given how good we three should be with words.’
Neither of the other two laughed at the joke. McClain sensed he was about to learn something dark. The fate of the innocents lured to New Hope seemed bleaker and more ominous by the moment. His phone rang and he jumped. Then he answered it and it was his Area Commander. The wife of missing merchant banker William Thompson had spoken to the Daily Mail. The only upside was that the storm still prevailed, cutting off the island. He ended the call.
O’Casey said, ‘A development?’
‘A complication I don’t need,’ McClain said.
‘Come along, gentlemen,’ Wilde said, opening his door. ‘We need to get this done and over with.’
It wasn’t a police station. It was some sort of civic building they entered not by knocking, but by using a key from O’Casey’s pocket. So it wasn’t a holding cell, it was instead a small, first floor meeting room with two Georgian windows allowing in diffuse light from the street outside. She was petite and red-headed, pretty, with pale green eyes and a band of youthful freckles sprayed across her face. She looked around 30 years of age. She was wearing a cheese-cloth smock-top and embroidered jeans and appeared utterly terrified. She was seated on one of four chairs at a hardwood table.
‘This is Mr. Rattigan,’ O’Casey said. ‘We’d like you to tell him what you’ve told us, starting at the beginning. Take your time, Rose.’
There was a carafe of water and cut crystal glasses on a silver tray at the table’s centre. Wilde poured a glass and pushed it towards their witness, or informant, their penitent, thought McClain. He tried not to let his chair legs scrape on the room’s polished floorboards as he took a seat. When the woman spoke, her accent was soft and local and her voice not much more than a tremulous whisper he had to strain to hear.
She’d first met Dennis Thorpe when he attended a folk night at a pub where she sometimes performed. She did covers of Cara Dillon and Heidi Talbot and more tentatively sometimes sang and played material of her own. She struck up a conversation with him after her short set at the bar. He was dark haired and charming in a quietly spoken way. He was the only man under 50 she’d ever met who could carry off a cravat. She later learned that he drove a Morgan roadster with wire-spoked wheels and a canvas hood. At the wheel of the car he tended to listen to the Quintet of the Hot Club of Paris, Django Reinhardt and Stephan Grappelli rhythmically infectious on scratchy recordings from the 1930s.
His knowledge concerning folk music seemed encyclopaedic. Like her, he was interested in legends and myths, in Ley lines and ghosts and standing stones; in banshees and witches and magic.
‘He seemed carefree and affluent, sophisticated, you’d say quite the glamour-boy, on the surface,’ Rose said. ‘I asked him about himself and laughing, he said he was just a lucky bastard. He told me he’d inherited something at 18 from the father he’d never known – a special book. So I suppose the bastard bit might have been factually accurate. But the lucky bit was just rhetoric because the contents of the book meant Dennis didn’t need to rely on good fortune.’
McClain asked, ‘Did Dennis tell you his father’s name?
‘His name was Peter Shanks. The book he sent had been written by Dennis’s paternal grandfather, a man named David Shanks.’
Rose never saw the book herself. She gathered it was partly autobiographical but that much of its content was to do with the practice of black magic. David Shanks had started to dabble with the occult in his early teens among a secret society, really a coven, at his sc
hool. They’d been discovered and expelled, an experience echoed when he was expelled from a Cornish coastal commune much later in life for the same offence.
‘By then he was quite powerful,’ Rose, who was Rose Brennan, said.
McClain said, ‘You mean you believe he could actually make things happen?
She looked at him sharply. She said, ‘I don’t know if he was as powerful as his grandson has become. He claimed to have mastered two types of magic, the spontaneous and the consequent. He could make himself difficult to see, invisible, provided he moved deliberately and quietly, with a bit of stealth.’
A penny dropped with a horrible clatter in McClain’s mind. He said, ‘Can Thorpe and the others do that?’
Rose Brennan just nodded. She said, ‘The consequent requires a ritual, quite elaborate, and then the events just unfold, they become inevitable, like fate. Dennis’s grandfather first claimed to have done that successfully with a subordinate he didn’t like in the army. He wrote that he did it on the Ypres Salient in the Great War. He performed the ritual and the man was blown to pieces the following day.’
‘Lots of people fell victim to artillery barrages in that conflict,’ McClain said. ‘Big guns were the main offensive weapon.’
She looked at him. She said, ‘David Shanks died 60 years ago so I can no more prove he was telling the truth than lying. But I’ve seen Dennis do this stuff.’
McClain said, ‘What else can he do?’
‘He has elemental power.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Over a localised area, he can manipulate weather,’
Gently, Wilde said, ‘Tell Mr. Rattigan about the source of Dennis Thorpe’s esoteric gifts.’
She looked even more nervous and distracted when he asked her that. She said, ‘He’d known the other two, Patricia and Jennifer, for ages. He came here for five successive summers. They never trusted me with everything. I was always kind of on probation. For Dennis I was mostly about the sex, though he did teach me a few things. They didn’t tell me everything, but I began to suspect.’
To McClain, O’Casey said, ‘Between 2005 and 2010, three children went missing from Clare orphanages. They weren’t straightforward cases of abduction by strangers in the sense that extended family members can be involved in that kind of crime. But none of the victims has ever been seen again.’
The Colony Trilogy Page 36