Except that wasn’t really true. What McClain really wanted was to see Ruthie Gillespie without ever having to discuss this investigation with her again. He couldn’t think of anything more sordid than murder committed in the belief that it would deliver the killer some magical reward. He wanted the case cleared up so that he could wash his hands of it, walk away, court Ruthie in a conventional manner, discuss only wholesome subjects, be carefree getting to know one another. He didn’t, though, hold out much honest expectation of that.
They were looking for solid evidence that a crime had been committed, which since the crime was murder, meant the bodies of its victims. They were looking for the crime’s perpetrators. Beyond that, they were looking for clues to give them a time-line, flesh-out a narrative, paint an accurate picture of what had gone on there. What he’d heard in Clare had made McClain fear the worst, but he still had nothing tangible.
It was two in the afternoon by the time the death dogs located the blood covering the floor of the windowless church in the New Hope Colony’s settlement. McClain didn’t need much forensics expertise to see that it had been a scene of butchery.
The weather was serene by then. They had divided into three separate parties. One had searched the abandoned retreat encampment, sited at a sheltered spot close to the Colony’s dock, only a few hundred metres from the expedition headquarters fashioned from Kevlar panels and titanium struts for McIntyre’s experts six years earlier. This group also searched that. Six Hebridean winters raging through it had left the compound in sorry condition, apart from the communications centre, still intact and a viable shelter for anybody urgently needing one.
The second of McClain’s parties searched the old Colony settlement on its hill, behind its wall, in the shadow of the granite heights at the island’s rough centre. That was home to the colony’s hovels, to its distillery and its tannery and its infamous windowless church, where legend insisted almost two centuries ago, Seamus Ballantyne had presided over bloody and desperate rituals enacted in some warped perversion of the Christian faith.
The third group went to the opposite extremity of the island from where they’d come ashore. Because the weather was mild and the sea calm, they were able to take the quickest route, along the packed sand and pebble strew of the shoreline, avoiding the boggy ground and rocky obstacles of New Hope’s hostile interior. Their objective was the crofter’s cottage built and whitewashed and occupied by David Shanks, until he’d fled it after seeing the infamous spirit he’d caught by chance on cine film.
Communication between each group was via short-wave radios. Their constant squawks and squelches of call signs and static was a comfort to McClain, a persistent aural reminder of their numerical strength and methodical, 21st century approach to the mystery of these new vanishings. He’d been shaken by what he’d seen small, scared, broken Rose Brennan accomplish despite those handicaps in a Georgian study in a grand building in the main street of Clare’s county town. He wouldn’t have trusted himself afterwards to believe it, had not Wilde and O’Casey witnessed it with him.
It made him wonder whether they had an audience now, Thorpe and his two female acolytes and lovers and cruel accomplices in murderous crime stock-still and silently watching them, smiling and invisible, as Rose had been able to become.
McClain had to admit to himself that he did feel under scrutiny on New Hope. It should have been a purposeful day for him, full of positivity, his first full day in possession of his new police rank, something he heard affirmed in the tone his fellow officers and volunteer companions used when they respectfully addressed him. And something he saw reflected in the stiff coming to attention of any colleague on the island he addressed.
But he felt uncomfortable there, harried, harrowed, almost haunted and most of all hostilely watched. And though the sun intermittently shone and the wind was light and the temperature about average for June, he felt the potential the place had for elemental violence creeping with that haste ominous shadows possess at sunset, fingering the ground with gloom and then casting the landscape into darkness.
McClain thought New Hope Island afflicted. And when the call came at 2pm telling him about the blood-spill the death dogs had discovered, he felt no sense of breakthrough or encouragement that they’d finally happened upon some tangible clue. He felt instead an awful presentiment at what might happen if they were now forced to spend the night there.
He was outside the Shanks cottage. He’d been staring at the doorframe, the door cracked and buckled and warped but still hanging by its top-most hinge and surprisingly intact. He’d been picturing the antic creature he’d recently erased from the image library on his phone, unable to tolerate its presence there any longer.
He took the demanding route to the settlement, always uphill, boulders and scree littering the swathes of heather and razor grass, the ground tricky at best and sometimes treacherous under his hiking boots. He went alone, accompanied only by the babble of short-wave chatter from the radio in his right fist, sensing company, malevolent and deadly, just beyond the reach of his peripheral vision as he journeyed upwards.
McGregor, his forensics team leader, was leaning again the wall of the distillery when McClain got there, hands folded across his chest, staring at his feet. He sensed the DI’s approach and stood upright letting his arms fall to his sides. A small rain shower had begun to spatter down on them, the drops big and cold, a huge rainbow vaulting through the sky, shimmering over the sea out to their west.
‘Let me have it, Jack.’
‘We’ve identified two blood groups. But even congealed, the quantity would have told us there was more than the one victim. I’m estimating three on blood volume. That’s not definitive, though. They were alive when they were cut and began to bleed out and it was all gush and no trickle, so I’m thinking carotid arteries, but that’s speculation because we’ve no bodies and therefore no wounds to examine.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘It was done two or three days ago, can’t be more exact than that without lab facilities. And either one of the perpetrators returned to the scene, or someone else stumbled upon it. I can’t imagine the killers coming back to paddle in gore, so I’m guessing the latter, male according to his size 10s and wearing trainers. Stride pattern doesn’t offer much in the way of a height estimate, because he was blundering around in a dark place.’
‘A place of darkness,’ McClain said.
‘Aye, that too, Sir, want to take a look?’
McClain played a flashlight beam over the blood and its footprints. The blood had blackened with staleness. There was a rotten meat taint to the air. The prints suggested exactly what McGregor had just said, their owner had been blundering. More likely he’d been a potential victim than one of the killers. A set of handcuffs and a rope had earlier been discovered in the comms room at the expedition compound. If their wearer had escaped them, this was probably the pattern made later by his feet. And he was likelier Freddie Boyle, gone back to being Terry Conway, than he was anyone else.
There was a separate and possibly less recent single bloody footprint outside the church entrance but it was too smeared and faint and incomplete to be of forensic value to them.
They’d discovered the blood, the handcuffs and the rope. But crucially, there were no bodies, living or dead. There was also no sign of Thorpe and his two accomplices, but if they were still on the island, they would need food and shelter.
McClain thought about this. Wind withered through the ribs of broken hovel roofs. Rain spattered on cobbles. When he looked up, the rainbow had departed the sky, which looked sullen, overcast, suddenly. If they were still there, invisibility alone couldn’t feed or shelter them. And McClain now thought they might plausibly still be there. They’d be three with food rations for seven only a week into a trip scheduled to last a fortnight. And it was possible David Shanks had built or discovered some secret refuge back in 1934 and described it in his book for his grandson to locate and use.
&nb
sp; McGregor, still at his side, said, ‘Any particular thoughts, Sir?’
It was by now 4 o’clock.
‘I’m going to stay on the island overnight,’ McClain heard himself say. ‘I want three people at the crofter’s cottage, three at the settlement and three at the expedition compound. If they’re here, they might come out at night and we’ll confront them when they do. And I think I know the identity of Footprint Man, who we haven’t succeeded in finding either. Maybe he’s nocturnal too.’
McGregor looked around, uneasily. The wind was strengthening, crooning shrilly now, the sense stirring in the compound that despite recent death or perhaps because of it, not all on New Hope remained still. He said, ‘Who’re you going to order to stay with you?’
McClain smiled at him. He said, ‘I’ll not be ordering anyone, Jack. I’ll be looking for volunteers, preferably of the unimaginative variety.’
Chapter Eleven
Lassiter drove a Jaguar. It was a fast car and he was a good driver and they set off early from Shaftesbury and were in Lewes in East Sussex by noon. He parked in the car park to the rear of the White Hart Hotel where they’d booked one of the period rooms in the main hotel building itself the previous night. Those came with fixtures and fittings from the time when Thomas Paine drank and conversed and probably smoked a contemplative pipe by the great fireplace in the ground-floor lounge. The rooms in the annex were modern by contrast, and characterless.
They were there because Lassiter had done some digging concerning Dennis Thorpe’s bookseller mother, Andrea. Her celebrated bookshop was sited just off Lewes high street and specialised in antique and collectable and of course her son’s highly successful series of paranormal thrillers, given proud and ample prominence on her shop’s website, when he looked.
The shop had been there for better than three decades. But before that, she had owned a bookshop in North London, in West Hampstead, not far from Kentish Town, where from a modest office premises, Peter Shanks had run his insurance business.
She had sold up and made a financial killing doing so already a couple of months pregnant with her son. Back in the early 1980s, recorded criminal offences had been written-up literally in a large feint-lined physical log kept by every police station and referred to as the crime book. Since then, the records had all been computerised. And it had taken only a phone call and an obliging civilian police records clerk for Lassiter to discover that two attempted break-ins had been staged within days at the West Hampstead shop less than a year before Dennis Thorpe’s birth.
This provided a plausible scenario for Andrea and Peter to meet. The police would have recommended after the break-in attempts that she beef-up her existing insurance cover or take out a new policy protecting her against theft. She could have then looked for a local firm as people did back in those days in the Yellow Pages. Or she could have been recommended Peter’s firm by a desk sergeant bunged a few quid each month as a sort of retainer for regularly doing so. Those cosy little local arrangements had been pretty common back then. And Lassiter couldn’t quite believe that the meeting between Dennis Shanks’ parents had been wholly innocent or had happened entirely by chance.
‘Plenty of ghosts here,’ Alice said, shivering, after they’d checked in and taken their bags up the creaking flights of wooden stairs to their room.
Lassiter was looking at her. He said, ‘Which of us decided on Shaftesbury anyway?’
‘It was mutual, wasn’t it? Why?’
‘I’m thinking of the odds against us happening on Shaftesbury just as an impulsive choice of destination after Swanage. And then happening upon that antiques arcade and then you happening on a pair of cuff-links that just happened to belong to a young man Nick McClain discovered yesterday David Shanks boasted of having killed.’
‘Beyond astronomical,’ Alice said, testing the bed, ‘like winning the Euro Millions lottery half a dozen times in a row. Hope this mattress doesn’t date authentically from the Tom Paine era.’
‘When was that?’
‘Well, he was involved in the American War of Independence.’ She stood and eyed the bed dubiously. ‘So it would have seen some action.’
‘Bloody hell,’ Lassiter said.
‘I’m teasing you,’ she said, ‘It’s a Slumberland.’
‘You can tell that just from touching it?’
‘No, darling, I can read a label.’
‘You don’t seem overly concerned, about those astronomical odds.’
She turned to face him. She smiled and said, ‘I remember something poor Phil Fortescue said after it all, six years ago, when it was finally over, before we even left New Hope. He said he felt he’d had no more control over things sometimes than a strung puppet.’
‘I miss Phil,’ Lassiter said.
‘Then do something about it.’
‘I remind him of Jane. All of us do. It’s why he stopped coming to the McIntyre dinners. He was very close to McIntyre and then Jane died and he severed himself from all of us. You know that.’
Alice sighed. Of course she knew it, she was a psychiatrist, he thought. The mechanics and mechanisms of grief were no mystery to her.
She said, ‘It’s no coincidence, Bell Street and the Robert Cross cuff-links. It’s fate. I get given my psychic insights for a reason. It’s always been to do with the island. Don’t bet against us having to go back there.’
He’d told her on the journey to Lewes what McClain had told him about Rose Brennan and Dennis Thorpe and Rose’s suspicions about what Thorpe and his other women were doing. And he’d told her about Thorpe’s belief in the latent power of New Hope before luring the innocents there.
Alice said, ‘When I went there before, I was terrified. I was sick with fear and I’d be no different now. But I don’t think your destiny is something you can cheat. I actually suspect there’d be a horrible price to pay if you tried to.’
‘You don’t sound much like a psychiatrist, saying that.’
‘I was a woman before I was a psychiatrist. Still am. Women have intuitions.’
‘Shall we go and surprise Andrea Thorpe?’
Alice looked at her watch. It was 12.30pm. She said, ‘Now’s going to be her busy time, till about two, with the lunchtime trade on top of all the tourist browsers. Let’s get some fresh air and get the kinks out climbing the hill to that monument to the Lewes Martyrs. Then we’ll grab some lunch and then we’ll go.’
‘You’re right,’ Lassiter said, ‘technically, we’re still on holiday.’
His wife smiled. She said, ‘A word I’m tempted to make you look up in the dictionary.’
They climbed the hill to the monument and took in the view of the town below with the castle and the old Banks’s brewery and the River Ouse a brown sparkle in the sunlight meandering through it. All around them were the verdant slopes and chalk cliffs of the Sussex Downs. The monument commemorated a grim atrocity impelled by religious oppression. But it was hard, Lassiter thought, for your spirit not to soar being somewhere so beautiful in the company of someone you loved.
They went back to the hotel and had a drink in the bar and then climbed the stairs to their room and went to bed for an hour. Lassiter had needed no reminding earlier, really, that his wife was before anything else a woman. Nor did he feel any reluctance about celebrating the fact.
Andrea Thorpe’s shop was in an alley off the high street. They had another drink after they’d both got out of bed and showered and changed into fresh clothes. They had their drinks in the bar with windows facing the street and the law court opposite, with its bronze embellishments and overall impression of proud civic grandeur rendered from stone. Lassiter drank a tonic water but made sure his wife’s gin and tonic was a potent double.
He knew her talk of psychiatry and fate had been more than mere bravado and more too than a pep-talk to herself. There was no bluster about her, she believed what she’d said, but he knew her well enough too to know that she was being deliberately brave. She hated what she was about t
o do. On every occasion it was a wilful step into a fearful unknown. She had no control over what it was she saw and felt as a consequence.
Alice finished her drink, fished out her slice of lime and bit into it, sucking with a puckered grimace of enjoyment. She winked at him and said, ‘Showtime.’
The twin window displays were bright and cheerful and expertly lit. The alley was high and narrow and cast into permanent shadow so the lights were needed. But the absence of sunshine at any time meant that the shop’s proprietor could risk her first editions in the window without the possibility of their dust jackets bleaching and fading. There was a display window to either side of the entrance. On the left were the prestigious hardback titles of the moment; on the right those titles by the likes of Ian Fleming and Graham Greene and Agatha Christie and Aldous Huxley clients would come here specifically to buy.
There was almost a shrine in the right-hand window to Virginia Woolf. That was clever and opportunistic and deliberately calculated and also slightly cold, Lassiter thought. But he only thought it because his clever wife had told him over their drink about Woolf’s bleak and lonely suicide a few miles from here in the Ouse.
They went inside. Andrea Thorpe was a handsome woman, approaching 70 and slender and county-town chic in a tailored skirt and silk blouse and a cloud of Chanel No. 5. She had on a colourful variety of rings and bracelets and a bright turquoise necklace. Her ash-blonde hair was straight and unadorned, worn longish for a woman of her age.
She treated them to the same smile Lassiter had no reason to think she didn’t endow on all her potential customers. She didn’t speak to them. No bookseller with brains ever tried the hard-sell on anyone. You could be a perennial browser or a serious collector with deep pockets and the pros would treat you all the same way because there really was absolutely no foolproof way of telling which from which.
Lassiter strayed towards Crime and a section on Jack the Ripper. He had his own theory about the identity of the Whitechapel killer, having done some reading on the subject and tagged him eventually as an elusive suspect named Edmund Caul. But he’d never shared the theory and his supposition was anyway beyond physical proof.
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