McClain could look around, searching for Terry Conway’s clothes, or he could raise the alarm back at his camp and it was a no brainer really because police officers and fishermen from the Hebrides knew all there was to know about hypothermia. He might never recover the man’s clothes. He didn’t know where they’d been discarded. They had blankets in their camp and they had fluids, drinks they could warm to get into him. He sprinted back and kicked and shook the other three awake. The four of them went back for their survivor, their witness, their victim, all in one.
When they saw him, what he’d done to himself, one of the constables puked mightily into the island turf. There was no hesitation, though, they got him huddled in minutes and sipping soup from a spoon shortly after that, his raw eye sockets disinfected and wadded with cotton wool and bandaged over.
They knew to heat the trunk first and not to warm the extremities until the core had recovered because that can cause further shock. They knew that rapid warming causes heart arrhythmia and so to go slow and light and patient with the blankets. They knew to apply CPR if the victim went into cardiac arrest and McClain did so, when Conway sank into medical decline, just before dawn came up. And he stuck at it for twenty minutes, until his subordinates gently pulled him off a corpse. His cover had killed Terry Conway, McClain reasoned. 40 years of soft-living as Freddie Boyle had proven to be coronary sabotage.
McClain tried to coax cogent detail out of the man during their efforts to save him, but delirium prevented him from confirming anything beyond the identity of his vindictive little playmate. In a few slurred phrases he described her, someone the D.I. had only seen cavorting on film in the early decades of the previous century. Conway’s plight was confirmation that she seemed still to be around.
McClain wondered how they hadn’t found Conway during their original search. It would take an autopsy to confirm it, but he suspected he’d been drugged prior to being bound with the cuffs and rope they’d recovered from the expedition’s comms room and taken there only after the departure of the first search party. Prior to that but after being drugged, he’d been somewhere else. Did that point to some secret location on New Hope used by Thorpe and his allies? The island was a place reluctant to surrender its secrets. But he thought it probably did.
McClain considered Terry Conway’s release merciful. He did not think that someone like the former soldier could have lived blind once his sanity returned to him. He had read the file, de-classified after 30 years and the man’s exploits in the Province had been the stuff of army legend. He might have coped with blindness, adjusting, if only the consequence of some unfortunate medical condition. As a result, though, of his own deliberate, savage self-harm? He wouldn’t have been able to reconcile himself to that. McClain didn’t think so, anyway.
He retrieved a body bag from their supplies. They’d brought several of those with them of course. They were leaving more or less empty handed, though.
By the time the chartered boat arrived for them at noon, The Detective Inspector and his nine volunteers were all packed up and ready to go. A light fog had descended and McClain had remembered what Rose Brennan had said about Dennis Thorpe’s power to influence the weather. They boarded their craft in near silence, in a general mood of despondency.
They were almost certainly dealing with a case of multiple-murder, something forensic tests would confirm in a day or two. They had the unlikely hypothesis that Terry Conway had gone berserk and slaughtered everyone. They’d failed to find any credible suspects, any witnesses, any survivors, or any bodies. They were leaving with no tangible leads. It was hard to conclude anything other than that New Hope Island, a place of enduring mystery, had defied and defeated them.
He had a bad moment, boarding the boat, when an unexpected wave lifted their inflatable and slapped it scraping rubber against the vessel’s barnacled metal hull. He thought they might capsize and he remembered the magic, what Rose Brennan had described as the spontaneous and the consequent and he experienced a sharp, nervous pang of vulnerability akin in nature to the feeling of vertigo.
Aboard the vessel, with access to a radio-phone line, after his de-brief and the testy media baptism of a conversation with the persistent journalist Lucy Church, McClain got through to Patrick Lassiter.
‘I’ve one piece of advice for you, son,’ Lassiter said, having heard him out. ‘Think of him not as Thorpe but as Dennis Shanks. That’s who he is because that’s who he’s always been. He’ll be formidable, I think, should you choose to take him on.’
‘I’ve no choice at all, Commander.’
‘No, I don’t suppose you have.’
‘It’s duty,’ McClain said, hearing a surprised bellow of human alarm from the deck above him and feeling the hull judder abruptly beneath his feet as the vessel he was aboard canted violently and the connection was severed.
Thus concluded the last conversation the two men would ever have. It would be the following morning before Lassiter would hear, with a blossoming sense of dread, about the disappearance of a passenger vessel chartered by the Western Isles Area Police Command in a fog bank a few miles north of New Hope Island.
It was assumed the boat had sunk rapidly. Trawlers and tankers in the area reported no sighting of any floating debris. The missing boat had been relatively modern and well maintained, judged thoroughly seaworthy, equipped with a life-raft and emergency beacon and its skipper was a master mariner with 30 years of ocean-going experience. There had been no distress call and all hands were feared lost. It was a catastrophe and a mystery both.
Ruthie heard about the sinking listening to the radio and brewing a pot of coffee. She didn’t generally cry over strangers. But she wept when she heard Detective Inspector Nick McClain’s name listed among those missing and presumed dead. He’d been made more attractive than he would have been otherwise by the air of melancholy he carried with him. That was caused, she knew, by the divorce from which he had not properly yet recovered. He would be denied the chance to do so now. He had died too young and before his generous heart had mended and the thought of his loss provoked irrepressible tears.
She heard Phil Fortescue’s footsteps descending the stairs and tried to wipe the tears away, rubbing only salt rawness into her eyes and blearing her vision. Doing this made her blink, turning his approach into a jump-cut scene from a silent movie. Her breath hitched on the soundtrack. He walked across to her and hugged her, a strong, warm embrace full of sympathy and concern.
‘What’s wrong? You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’
‘Someone had died.’
‘Someone you were close to?’
‘The Scottish detective investigating the New Hope thing was aboard a boat lost at sea.’
‘You liked him, didn’t you, Ruthie.’
‘I liked him a lot.’
They hadn’t slept together. She’d told poor, dead Nick McClain the truth about that. She wasn’t a woman these days to risk that degree of intimacy with anyone on the first night. She felt relieved now about this. She thought that if she had slept with Phil, he’d be intruding on her grief. But she hadn’t and so he wasn’t and instead she was grateful, shocked and saddened, for his kind and easy company, his gentle voice and the reassuring touch of him.
They drank their coffee in the garden. She saw Fortescue mask a frown as she fumbled out and lit a cigarette. That was okay. It just proved he wasn’t a poker player. Not a good one, anyway. She said, ‘What do you think will happen now?’
‘You mean with New Hope?’
‘Yes.’
‘You keep asking me questions you’d be better putting to Patsy Lassiter.’
‘I don’t know Patsy Lassiter.’
‘I suppose it depends on what they found. They would have been in constant radio contact with police headquarters to report on any developments. Or as much radio contact as the elements allowed. But when people vanish somewhere hostile, things get scaled back pretty fast. After a few days, if they’re people ine
xperienced at living in the wild, you’re looking for corpses. That’s the reality.’
‘Can I ask you a serious question, Phil?’
‘Fire away.’
‘Are you certain you destroyed that thing when you went there?’
He didn’t answer for a moment. Then he said, ‘The memory of it’s really vague, like I wasn’t supposed to remember. But I’m pretty sure, or I wouldn’t be here talking to you. I’d be dead and vanished like the rest.’
‘When do Lucy and Edith leave?’
‘They’re on their way. They’ll get there some time this morning, I should think.’
‘What’s the point, if they’re only looking for corpses?’ Ruthie put out her cigarette and immediately lit another. ‘No hope on New Hope,’ she said, exhaling smoke palely into sunlight.
‘I got to know Alexander McIntyre pretty well,’ Fortescue said. ‘Less so since Jane’s death, when I stopped going to the dinners he organises for the group. But he’s protective about the island, almost as if he owns it. And Lucy works for the paper he does own. I’m pretty sure he’s sending her just because he can. It’s a rich man’s petulant whim, a punishment for his paper not being first with the story. Lucy’s taking the rap.’
‘She’s a features writer and it was surely the news desk’s fault.’
‘Petulance isn’t that logical. She was involved with the original expedition, remember.’
‘The Mail have done a couple of updates on their retreat scoop, but they’ve not sent anyone there.’
‘That’s because they don’t think they’ll find anything worth justifying the cost. And mysteries make better headlines left unsolved.’
‘Like the Loch Ness Monster,’ Ruthie said.
Fortescue said, ‘Except the monster on New Hope Island was real.’
Despite the sunshine, Ruthie shivered.
It was Saturday, which was one reason Fortescue had stayed the night, rather than catching the last ferry back to Pompey and the mainland. He didn’t have to go to work. He’d stayed in Ruthie’s second bedroom. They had kissed and he hadn’t seemed remotely out of practice at it if she was any judge. Now she looked at him, at the pectorals and biceps tautly shaping the contours of his T-shirt.
‘You didn’t used to look like that, on the telly I mean.’
‘No, but both of my granddads were dockers. They worked physically all their lives and were strong men to start with. So was my dad, who worked on the North Sea rigs. My brother was ABA light-heavyweight champion. He’d have turned pro except for mum begging him not to. That’s boxing I’m talking about, by the way, with my brother. It’s in my genes. I just had to encourage it a bit.’
‘Is that what you do, go to a boxing gym?’
‘I was very angry after Jane died, pointlessly. Hitting the bag and the pads helped. Still does.’
‘You didn’t sound like you do now on the telly either. Your accent was sort of, I don’t know, diluted, by comparison.’
‘They were thinking foreign rights. They asked me to tone it down for the American market. I wouldn’t do that again. My toning-down days are well behind me.’
She took him to the Longshoreman’s Museum and then to Ventnor Rare Books. They had coffee at the Minghella ice-cream parlour. The seafront wasn’t yet as frantic with visitors as it would become in July and August. But it was the weekend and the beach bustled, dads hammering canvas windbreaks hired from the Blake’s concession into the shingle with wooden mallets, staking out a little seaside empire for their families. All of the brightly painted beach huts looked occupied.
Ruthie cooked them a late breakfast, or an early lunch of bacon and scrambled eggs and fried mushrooms. They ate it at the table in her garden. She’d emptied and hidden her ashtray by then. Even to her, familiar with that bowl of old black Bakelite, it had looked the size of a car hubcap and alarmingly full.
When they heard the front doorbell ring at a quarter to one, Ruthie was washing up at her kitchen sink, elbow deep in Fairy Liquid suds. Fortescue was in the garden, tinkering with his phone.
She said, ‘Can you answer that? It’s the postman delivering a book I’ll never read. You won’t have to sign for it or anything. It’s just too big for my little letterbox.’
She heard a commotion a moment later at the front door, loud voices, one of them female, Scouse exclamations of surprise. Then Fortescue walked back into the house with two people she’d never met before. One was a blonde, slender, expensively dressed woman. The other was a sallow, sparely built, tough-looking man in a two-piece suit.
She shook suds from her hands and dried them on a tea towel. She knew who these people were. They were Alice Lang and Patrick Lassiter and she was curiously unsurprised to see them. She guessed from the expressions on their faces that they’d come because of Nick McClain’s death. It was an escalation, wasn’t it? She remembered then Phil’s comment about New Hope, when he’d said that the island hadn’t finished with him and had only just started with her.
‘I think we’d all better go into the garden,’ Ruthie said. ‘It’s a bit crowded for four in here.’
On the way out, she retrieved her ashtray. A large part of her did want to give up smoking, at least some of the time, anyway. It wasn’t going to happen today, though.
Lassiter’s first thought on seeing him was that Phil Fortescue had aged a decade since their last encounter. Three years had slipped by since then. He’d grown into himself and the lines on his face gave him a rugged physical appeal that hadn’t been there before. He’d been a brave and determined man who’d looked lightweight and callow. Now he looked like the man he was, and Lassiter was moved by his strong embrace at the door, just as firmly returned, a moment after Phil had hugged Alice fondly and kissed her on the cheek.
He’d been curious to see Ruthie Gillespie in the flesh, who met all his expectations and then some. There were people who brightened the spaces they occupied like klieg lights, without doing anything. It was a rare gift and she possessed it, though her smile of greeting was conflicted by sadness. She was sad about Nick McClain. That was obvious. What wasn’t obvious was what Phil Fortescue was doing there. Lassiter’s instinct and training meant that he wasn’t often surprised, but he’d been gobsmacked just now to see Phil open Ruthie’s door.
Ruthie made her guests tea. When they were all seated outside, Lassiter asked her, ‘Did McClain tell you about what he heard and saw in Ireland?’
‘I didn’t know he’d been to Ireland.’
‘Four days ago, on the strength of what he’d learned about Dennis Thorpe and his accomplices. He learned there that Thorpe was also Dennis Shanks, because he’s David Shanks’ grandson.’
Lassiter told Ruthie and Fortescue what he’d discovered from the crime records logged by the police at West Hampstead in the early 1980s, his theory as to how Dennis’s parents had met. He told them about the book Dennis had been passed down, about the magic, spontaneous and consequent and about the powers claimed by its practitioners.
‘Anything you’ve left out?’ Ruthie said when he’d finished.
And Lassiter was reminded that McClain thought she’d an instinct for the work. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Detective Inspector McClain was skeptical. So Rose provided proof with a little demonstration. In a room shared with him, the Archbishop of the Diocese and the County Clare Police Chief, she successfully concealed herself. She just vanished, he said. And then moments later she reappeared.’
There was a silence. Fortescue filled it. He said, ‘It’s lovely to see you two, of course. But why are you here?’
‘We could ask you the same question,’ Alice said.
Fortescue blushed and Ruthie liked him all the more for that. ‘Consenting adults,’ she said to Alice, who smiled.
Alice said, ‘It’s overdue, Phil.’ She reached forward from where she sat and patted and squeezed his thigh.
Fortescue cleared his throat. His cheeks wore hectic pink blotches. He said, ‘Very early days.’
�
�But the forecast is promising,’ Ruthie said.
‘Then I’m here to rain on your parade,’ Lassiter said, ‘because nothing I’ve concluded about all this is anything other than gloomy.’
That got everyone’s attention. He told them he’d been looking for common links since the previous day beyond the ambition to write among the retreat murder victims. His big clue came when McClain confirmed early in the afternoon that Freddie Boyle hadn’t been among them. Freddie Boyle had also been Terry Conway, a man morally compromised by his covert work as a special-forces assassin handled by MI5 in the Province in the early 1970s.
Lassiter discovered that William Thompson – who’d turned down a knighthood – sat on the boards of two influential charities. He’d made them influential, organising low-interest loans to get them established, lobbying friends and business contacts to contribute to their coffers. One of these organisations helped homeless young people and the other sufferers from depression.
‘Not the most fashionable of causes on either count,’ Lassiter said, ‘but William Thompson was interested in making a difference rather than a splash.’
Debbie Carter was an average 38 year old in every way, leading a semi-detached life with her husband and pre-teen kids in a suburban locale, driving a Ford Focus, embarrassed by a slight fictive crush on Christian Grey. Except that she’d responded to a bone marrow donor appeal launched on behalf of a 12 year old boy with leukaemia. She’d proven to be a match and thus had saved the life of a total stranger.
Suzie Ford had a similar temperament to Debbie, probably why, as Ruthie had recalled and told Nick McClain, they’d got on so well at the two seminars preparatory to the trip. She also volunteered as a Samaritans counsellor three evenings a week. She was naturally empathetic, a fluent communicator and someone deeply compassionate. It was her supervisor’s considered view that she’d saved dozens of lives over her seven years of answering calls made out of lonely desperation.
To Ruthie, Lassiter said, ‘I don’t think Dennis Shanks knew anything about Freddie Boyle’s real identity. Freddie was short-listed because he was a veteran Fleet Street hack, to give the retreat a bit of pedigree and credibility. The rest of you, the intended victims of ritual human slaying, were hand-picked. I reckon there must have been scores of applicants, but he needed a manageable number, physically and logistically. It was sacrifice, not slaughter, and therefore quite a compliment to be chosen.’
The Colony Trilogy Page 40