Alice made for the Dennis Thorpe display.
‘My son wrote those,’ Andrea Thorpe said, gliding across to her.
‘I’m impressed,’ Alice said.
‘They were well received and sold impressively. He did one a year for five years and then stopped. That was five years ago and nothing since, I’m afraid.’
‘Writers’ block?’
Andrea Thorpe frowned.
‘Alice Lang,’ Alice said, ‘I’m a psychiatrist.’ She held out her hand. Andrea Thorpe shook it, spoke her name, Lassiter watched. And nothing happened.
Alice released her grip. She said, ‘I didn’t mean to be tactless, I have a professional interest in the workings of the mind.’
‘Dennis isn’t blocked,’ Andrea Thorpe said, ‘he’s working on something else, that’s all. He has a big non-fiction project, terribly ambitious and involved.’
‘I see.’
There was a bit more small-talk before Alice disentangled herself. Lassiter had a flick though the Dennis Thorpe display. All the books were signed copies. The blurb on the dust jacket of one of them told him it was set somewhere very similar to New Hope. Its short, ambiguous title was Island Life. He paid for it and its author’s mother put the book and receipt in a plastic bag for him without that bland smile ever leaving her face.
They exited the shop and turned right and walked all the way down the hill to Cliffe High Street without speaking. They got to the Costa branch there and found a table outside and Lassiter bought them drinks and they listened to the cacophony of competing buskers occupying too small a space around the bridge over the river sipping their flat whites.
‘Nothing,’ Alice said eventually. ‘It’s this absence, the chasm in her mind where her son ought to be, or her feelings for her son, or even any thoughts concerning him.’
‘He’s done that,’ Lassiter said. ‘He didn’t want to leave a trail or provide anyone coming after him with any clues.’
‘That sounds careful and meticulous. You told me that girl who didn’t go said it was all half-arsed and a bit rushed.’
‘That girl is a 33 year old woman and she told Nick McClain it felt rushed and he told me she’s particularly astute. She’s probably the only one of them who picked up on that. My feeling is that Thorpe knew Rose Brennan was about to expose him and was rushed as a consequence. New Hope was probably longer for him in the planning than the process. The scheme overall was thorough and detailed but the schedule was hastened by the Rose factor. He still managed to get his victims there, though.’
‘Not all of them,’ Alice said. ‘Your astute Wight woman got away.’
‘I suspect what Ruthie Gillespie actually got was a temporary reprieve,’ Lassiter said. ‘I haven’t worked out a common link between the victims, but it seems likelier than not there is one and if there is, she’ll be unfinished business.’
Alice said, ‘Rose struggled with her guilt for almost six years before she cracked. How did Thorpe know that was coming?’
Lassiter sipped coffee and shrugged. He said, ‘We’d be better thinking of him as Dennis Shanks. He’ll be thinking of himself that way. If he killed those people in Ireland it took a confession from one of his lovers to expose his guilt. The Irish police aren’t fools. Yet he was never suspected. He’s cunning and formidable and he selected child victims and someone handicapped. He’s completely ruthless.’
‘If he thought Rose was going to spill the beans, why not just kill her?’
‘Rose was solely about the sex for him. He never involved her in the serious stuff. She was always on probation, in her own phrase. All her suspicions amount to is hearsay. And it’s possible he taught her enough tricks to be able to mask her intentions or take precautions to protect herself. Maybe he just didn’t have time to kill her.’
‘I doubt he’s sane,’ Alice said.
‘Whether he is or he isn’t, he’s still clever. Mad people have ruled empires.’
Alice looked at the book in its bag on the table between them. She bit her lip. She said, ‘I’ll do that in our room, in case anything dramatic happens. It’s all a bit genteel around here for screeching and witchcraft.’
‘You’re not a witch.’ He thought of her touching the cuff-links in Shaftesbury, seeing Robert Cross blown to pieces by a shrapnel shell a century ago.
She drained her coffee cup and rose to go. ‘Sometimes I don’t know what I am,’ she said.
They walked up the hill to Lewes High Street and the White Hart. Their holiday was coming to its conclusion and Lassiter felt sad about that, through the apprehension he felt at what might happen when Alice held the book Dennis Thorpe or rather Dennis Shanks had signed.
Their holiday had been too short. And thinking that made him think of Phil Fortescue. Phil who’d been given no time at all, really, with the woman he’d met and fallen for only weeks after Lassiter and Alice had begun their relationship. He’d been an alcoholic still drinking when they’d originally started seeing one another. And fuelled daily by booze, remorse and self-disgust, in his treatment of Phil back then he’d been surely, curt and patronising.
At his side, Alice said, ‘Why are you smiling?’
‘I was thinking about when I first got to know Phil and I warned him not to do that Scouse thing and abbreviate my Christian name to Patsy.’
‘I’ve never heard him call you anything else.’
‘That’s why I’m smiling.’
‘You’ve got to call him.’
‘I know.’
They climbed the stairs to their room and Lassiter locked the door from the inside. He had no idea what was about to happen, but if anything loud and dramatic occurred to alert the staff, he wanted a moment of privacy in which they could compose themselves. His wife’s dignity was important to him and he would do anything he could to try to preserve it.
Alice held out her hands. He placed the book between them. She closed her eyes. A long breath shuddered into her and then shuddered back out. She became even paler skinned than she usually was. After a moment she opened her eyes. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Well, darkness, but that’s not him, it’s because I’m in the dark about him.’
Lassiter took the book from her and tossed it onto a chair.
‘What will the Clare police do about Rose Brennan’s story?’
‘The Garda will be professional, thorough, persistent and tenacious and unless they locate a body, they’ll get nowhere without confessions and something tells me they won’t get those. Or they won’t from Dennis Shanks. I suppose it’s possible one of the women might crack.’
Alice said, ‘The Manson Family women didn’t crack.’
‘That’s true.’
‘Detective Sergeant McClain has his work cut out.’
‘He’s Detective Inspector McClain, as of yesterday.’
Alice said, ‘Regardless of his rank, I think Nick McClain might be out of his depth.’
Ruthie and Phil went again to the Spyglass Inn. The early evening weather was fine and so they found a table outside. Ruthie sipped lager and said, ‘I was almost lured to New Hope. I don’t know why me and I don’t know for what purpose, though it all seems very ominous. All I do know is that I had a feeling stronger than a presentiment and less precise than a premonition that was just enough to stop me going.’
‘But it was a close run thing.’
‘Yes, Phil, it was, closer than I’ve been prepared to admit to myself, despite not taking to Dennis Thorpe. I was attracted by the grandeur and the isolation.’
‘Well, it’s got an abundance of both.’
‘I thought the place might trigger me creatively. How sad does that sound?’
‘It sounds a bit misguided. But that’s from the perspective of someone who’s been there.’
‘I want you to tell me about how you came to go and what you found when you got there,’ Ruthie said. ‘Or what found you, if that’s truer to how it was.’
‘There are things I’d rather discuss, frankly,’ Fortescu
e said.
‘I’m a believer in fate, Phil. I was spared for a reason and the reason is to do with New Hope Island. Tell me what happened there and why.’
He sighed and sipped beer and began to speak. ‘Edith Chambers was given some clues by what she believed was the ghost of one of Ballantyne’s crew aboard the Andromeda. Those clues led me to Barnsley, where the Andromeda’s ship’s physician settled after resigning his commission. He was Thomas Horan and he treated the mine-workers and he’d hidden a journal written during what became his last voyage. I found the journal in a played-out shaft at a derelict pit.
‘One of the slaves picked up on the coast of West Africa had made Horan curious enough to describe and converse with him. This slave claimed he had occult powers. He demanded Ballantyne treat him as an equal and a guest. Ballantyne’s response was to mutilate him in front of the crew and his wounds became infected.
‘Horan recounted how this sorcerer doubly cursed Ballantyne as he lay rotting to death. There was the business with Ballantyne’s as yet unborn daughter, Rachel, who would return as a sort of living affront to natural life. But there was more, he conjured what he called The Being that Hungers in the Darkness. It’s corporeal, a living creature. It’s monstrous and relentless and it devours people. And it was this entity that came into actuality years later on the island and consumed Ballantyne’s community, stealthily, one victim at a time.’
‘And by the time you found this out, McIntyre’s expedition were already on New Hope?’
‘By the time I found this out, three of them were already dead, or missing, which amounted to the same thing.’
‘You went there to save them?’
‘The sorcerer regretted what he’d set in motion, the magnitude of it, even though he’d been murdered, effectively, by Ballantyne. Dying, he was too enfeebled to reverse what he’d done. But he begged Horan to write down a sort of incantation that could destroy the creature. Horan did write it down, phonetically and I learned it on the way to New Hope with McIntyre, who was remorseful enough about the whole misbegotten adventure by then to engineer us getting there as fast as we could.’
‘And you confronted this thing?’
‘I don’t really remember much about it. It was in the windowless church. Lucy was there, bleeding and dazed on the floor. I think I was sort of possessed, to be honest. There was more to it than a recitation, there were steps and gestures I didn’t feel were mine at all. It was a ritual, ancient magic, I suppose. I only performed it with someone or something pulling my strings.’
‘Jesus, Phil.’
‘It was about as far away as you could get from Jesus.’ He shrugged, ‘Anyway, it worked.’
He looked around. He looked at the sea and the descending sun in its orange patch over to the west of the otherwise cobalt sky. He said, ‘This is a lovely part of the world. Thank you for asking me out, Ruthie, it was a lovely surprise. I was getting up the courage to ask you, believe it or not.’
‘Was courage really needed?’
‘I’m massively out of practice and I doubt you’re short of would-be suitors.’
‘Suitors,’ she said. ‘What an old fashioned word.’
He smiled. She knew his mind hadn’t been dragged back fully from his ordeal on New Hope. He’d shaved and brushed his hair for her. The strands between the grey were russet in the diminishing light. She wanted to stroke it. She wanted to touch his cheek with her fingertips. She said, ‘And now Lucy Church is going back there according to the Chronicle’s website and according to you, she’s taking Edie with her.’
Fortescue looked down at his glass on their table. He said, ‘Short of physical incarceration there isn’t a lot I can do about that. Lucy and Edie’s mum bonded six years ago in the run-up to the expedition. They became best friends. Edie calls her Auntie Lucy and she’s 19, hardly a child. And it’s a fantastic opportunity to get something unique on her C.V. I’m quoting her, saying that. I don’t feel particularly happy about it.’
Ruthie stood. ‘I’ll get us another drink.’
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘According to the saying, you don’t ask, you don’t get.’
‘Have you given up smoking? We’ve been here half an hour and you haven’t had one yet.’
‘No, I haven’t given up. It’s just that when I kiss you later, I want you to enjoy it as much as I’m going to.’
‘I’m out of practice at kissing.’
‘It’s like riding a bike,’ Ruthie said, ‘only much more fun.’
Chapter Twelve
The singing awoke McClain.
He’d got his volunteers. Six of them were serving officers keener on overtime than they were frightened of things going bump in New Hope’s night. The remaining three were trawler men, Billy Knox and his grown-up sons Will and Jacob. They were men of the sea and so McClain suspected that they’d have their share of superstitions, but Billy was a church elder and a man with a strong sense of community and he didn’t like what this latest spate of disappearances would do for the reputation of the islands. His sister owned a B&B on North Uist. If the mystery could be solved, Billy wanted a hand in solving it.
McClain was with two constables and Jacob Knox and they’d encamped at the same spot the retreat had chosen just over a week earlier. The retreat’s tents and sleeping bags had been taken by the storm. Nothing remained of their occupation but a couple of bottles of Calor gas and a few pathetic items of folding cutlery, already rusting. Hope lost, aspiration destroyed and ambition thwarted, McClain thought, hammering tent pegs into reluctant ground. Innocence presumed upon and then betrayed.
The D.I.’s logic was that this spot, or the nearby expedition base erected five years earlier, were the likeliest locations to witness a visit from Dennis Thorpe and his surviving companions. The Colony settlement was uninhabitably bleak. The crofter’s cottage was too obvious, given Thorpe’s assumed ancestral link with it. And they’d found the handcuffs and rope presumably used to bind Terry Conway in the comms centre, the one intact building at the heart of the expedition compound. So Thorpe and his accomplices had been there before. They might come back to it. There was also the chance that Terry Conway might still be alive – his body hadn’t been found, after all, and there was evidence that he’d escaped captivity. McClain’s volunteers were stationed anyway at the other places, teams of three at each.
The singing woke him. It was a song he’d heard once or twice played on the Wednesday evening BBC Radio 2 Folk Show, back in the days when that had been presented by Mike Harding. Harding had written the sleeve notes for at least one of its composer’s albums. Kate Rusby had written the song, which was Who Will Sing Me Lullabies. It wasn’t her singing it now, though. It was a male voice, a light tenor with a gentle carry through the island’s still, starlit night.
McClain squirmed quietly out of his sleeping bag. Neither of the two constables nor the fisherman there with him had stirred. The others had enjoyed a generous nightcap of whisky prior to turning in and he hadn’t blamed them for that, but hadn’t shared a drink with them either. He was in charge.
Nor did he share their tacit but unspoken belief that staying on the island through the night was only a symbolic gesture. The singing, now, was proving it. He’d slept fully clothed. He glanced at the luminous dial of his wristwatch. It was just after 3am. He laced on his boots growing accustomed to the available light and set off to find the source of the singing.
He was struck by how lonely the human voice sounded in the darkness in the small hours singing unaccompanied by instruments. It was the sound of a fugitive, or a hermit or it was the disembodied music of a ghost. He shivered. It was cold in the sunless exposure to the sea and air of this granite sanctuary of old mysteries on which he’d stayed for his reluctant vigil. He thought then of the settlement on the heights above him, crime scene tape flapping with surreal brightness around the gloomy sepulchre the windowless church had become. He was nervous here, but glad he wasn’t there.
The singing grew louder. It sounded quite feeble, the closer he got to its source, breathy and faltering, powered by strengthless lungs and vigour barely remembered. The song was completed and there was silence. And then it began again, the weary endless cycle of something sung by rote, compulsively, as though to distract the singer from the panic and terror threatened by the onset of coherent thought.
He saw the outline of a figure, naked and squatting. And he saw the figure become aware of him as its outline stiffened and the singing abruptly stopped. He was close enough to hear its raspy respiration, shallow and rapid and harsh. It had its back to him.
‘I was playing with my new friend,’ it said. ‘I was playing blind-man’s buff with my new friend and she said I was cheating.’
The figure turned, twisting on the ground to face McClain. And he recognised the features of Terry Conway. Or he recognised some of the features, from his file pictures of those who’d gone on the New Hope Island retreat. Not all of Terry’s features were present to be recognised, in fairness. He was now missing his eyes.
They’d been gouged out, McClain saw, in the bright starlight. The sockets were just black, unblinking holes. And the gore staining his hands and congealed under his fingernails told the detective that he’d accomplished this zealous mutilation himself.
‘Can’t cheat now,’ he said. ‘She was upset with me for cheating. But I won’t cheat next time we play. I’ll never cheat again.’
The man on the ground in front of him had shed forty pounds since the file photo he’d studied had been taken. His ribs were exposed like wing struts through his skin. There was a pallor to him that looked ominous. He was suffering from exposure. He would be dehydrated by that. He had serious and possibly critical hypothermia. He was conscious, but he was in shock. And of course, he was now completely blind.
The Colony Trilogy Page 39