Ruthie wrinkled her nose. ‘Why choose me? I’m hardly a secular saint.’
‘I’ve read your books, over the last few days, Ruthie,’ Lassiter said. ‘In all of them, good triumphs over evil.’
‘Of course it does, they’re for children.’
‘And they’re entertaining, but they’re probably more didactic than you think.’
‘My husband, the literary critic,’ Alice said. ‘It’s a life of surprises.’
Lassiter was still looking at Ruthie. He said, ‘We live in a cruel and neglectful world. Not all children get given a moral compass. You provide them with one. Your books are a force for good.’
He’d been leaning forward. Now he sat up. To Alice he said, ‘It’s less a life of surprises than it was until a few days ago. Why don’t you tell Phil and Ruthie about that?’
She did. She told them about the way in which her psychic gift had returned to her. Then she told them about the fruitless visit to the Lewes bookshop owned by the mother of the man they now knew as Dennis Shanks.
Fortescue said, ‘What do you plan to do, Patsy?’
‘Yesterday I requested and was given a further week’s leave. I liked Nick McClain, for a man I’d never actually met. I admired him too. I’m tempted to go after Shanks. I think it’s a dangerous thing to attempt, possibly lethally so. But I’ve never wanted to nail anyone more. The honest truth is I’m still debating it.’
‘We’re debating it,’ Alice said.
Phil said, ‘You’d go too?’
‘I’m given these psychic insights for a reason. They might save Patrick’s life. He goes, I go.’
Fortescue said, ‘How much of a danger do you think Shanks is now he’s completed his sacrifices?’
‘He hasn’t completed them,’ Lassiter said. ‘He’s unfinished business with one Ruthie Gillespie.’
‘I mean how much of a hazard does he pose to people he’s never come across before. Not police officers, civilians.’
‘There’s no way of knowing. Why?’
‘Because Lucy Church and Edie Chambers were headed for New Hope with Paul Napier and they’ll have arrived by now.’
Fortescue thought about all he’d just been told. He tried not to let the panic he felt at the danger Edie was in overwhelm him. Lucy Church wouldn’t be scared off New Hope by Lassiter’s revelations about Dennis Shanks and his two bloody acolytes. Ritual killing mixed with black magic was a sensational story and if Shanks was still on the island, she was closer there to its source than she was anywhere else. The only way to get her to leave was to order her off and the only person who could do that was Alexander McIntyre. She was a big enough draw as a star-writer to defy her editor. She couldn’t defy the paper’s proprietor though and expect to keep her job.
He turned to Lassiter. He said, ‘Here’s what we do. We bring Alex McIntyre up to speed. We get McIntyre to charter a helicopter and send it here to take us to New Hope Island today. While we’re waiting for the chopper to arrive we stock up on enough food and water and camping gear to see out one of the island’s storms if one hits before we get back out. We don’t go looking for Shanks, not with Edie on the island. We just get everyone out as quick as we can.’
‘Lucy won’t want to leave without her story.’
‘McIntyre will give her no choice.’
‘She’ll kill the messenger.’
‘I don’t give a fuck, Patsy. I made Edith’s mum a promise concerning her daughter’s wellbeing on her deathbed. You don’t break those.’
Ruthie remembered Edie saying that about her stepdad, that he never broke a promise.
Lassiter reached out a hand and squeezed his shoulder. ‘Paul’s with them, Phil. And Paul Napier’s a formidable man.’
‘He is, but there’s only one of him,’ Fortescue said, ‘and he’s no idea of what he might be up against. I’ll make that call.’
‘What about me?’ Ruthie said.
All three of them turned to look at her.
‘According to Commander Lassiter, I’m the one in imminent danger of being sacrificed by a maniac. You can’t leave me unprotected.’
‘The danger isn’t imminent,’ Lassiter said, ‘but neither will it just go away. We came here today to warn you of that.’
‘How did you find me?’
‘You’re on the electoral role. Even if you weren’t, do a Google image search and you’re photographed in a publicity shot outside your cottage door. If you hadn’t been here, your usual haunts are Ventnor Rare Books and the Spyglass Inn and physically, you’re hardly nondescript. You’re not a difficult person to locate, Ruthie. We found you easily, and you’d have given him more details than we had for the retreat enrolment.’
‘Which makes me all the more vulnerable. Where’s the theory that I’m still in danger come from?’
Lassiter said, ‘McClain’s death indicates that Dennis Shanks is still in the Hebrides, apparently well hidden but still on New Hope. Your retreat no-show was too abrupt for him to predict, but will have dismayed him. We know quite a bit about ritual sacrifice, stuff we’ve learned since a child victim’s torso was discovered in the Thames a decade ago. You will have been pledged or promised specifically. It won’t be a pledge he’ll feel he can renege upon.’
‘Charming, Commander,’ Ruthie said.
‘And it isn’t Commander, to you,’ Lassiter said, ‘it’s Patrick.’ And then, ‘Oh, hell, you may as well call me Patsy.’
‘Everyone does, darling,’ Alice said. ‘You’re King Canute defying the tide. Get used to it.’
Chapter Thirteen
The swell had been gentle, the wind light, the sky clear and the forecast good. So they’d been able to get to the island aboard a rigid inflatable. It was the same spec and model as the one the RNLI used; practically unsinkable and extremely difficult to capsize even in the hands of an inexperienced idiot. Napier wasn’t an idiot, he didn’t think, most of the time. And he wasn’t inexperienced. He’d reached combat zones aboard similar craft many times in the Parachute Regiment. They did far more amphibious assaults these days than they did drops out of aircraft. Not that he’d ever have admitted as much to a Royal Marine.
The visibility was excellent and of course, he knew the island’s topography well enough to scale-model it accurate to a few feet. There’d been a lot of patrolling the last time he’d been there and precious little relaxation.
He was able to select a nice flat run of beach with almost no surf in these conditions and a gentle incline of packed sand and about 20 feet offshore had simply flipped the outboard up, cutting its motor and letting their momentum glide them up beyond the tide line.
‘That was neatly done,’ Lucy said. Her tone was neutral. He smiled without looking at her. He’d take the compliment anyway. Precious few of them came his way these days. His passengers clambered out and onto Scottish soil. Not that there was much actual soil on New Hope, which tended to be peat bog where it wasn’t granite and scrub. Birds were the only wildlife the island supported; the only natural wildlife, at least. There were other kinds. He remembered those from his last visit.
After Edith and Lucy had got out, he hauled the R.I. further up to where the scrub would largely conceal it. Then he collected sufficient substantial rocks to weigh it too heavily for all but a hurricane to shift. Once he’d got this stony cargo aboard, the three of them set off with their heavy packs of gear on their backs for the compound built for the New Hope expedition six years earlier.
He’d actually met Lucy before that. She’d been embedded in Afghanistan. She’d been the very model of the gutsy, hard-living woman war correspondent back then. Embedded in Afghanistan, bedded on New Hope, he thought, which was actually true. Fear and uncertainty had forced them to seek refuge in each other’s arms and something precious had been born from that back then that had since perished entirely.
In Helmand he’d been assigned to keep an eye on her; not to censor her, but to keep her alive. Then she’d left and he’d taken part in the
action that won him his medal and after that the breakdown had come and the end of his military career and when they’d met again on New Hope he’d been wearing the lowly, ubiquitous blue of a private security firm.
She’d wanted him despite his decline. Now she trudged beside him, chatting to Edie Chambers, neither of them even thinking to complain about the 60 pounds or so of kit being carried across their backs. He eased the digging straps of his own pack and smelled salt heady on that slight breeze otherwise honeyed by heather. There was sweat on his forehead and sun on his back.
He’d anticipated what he’d feel coming back to New Hope, but hadn’t expected this. He’d expected trepidation, fear, perhaps a touch in the deepest part of the night of actual dread. Instead, intense nostalgia had ambushed him. He could have wept, thinking about what he’d carelessly allowed to slip through his fingers since he’d last been here.
They got to the spot where they weren’t to know Nick McClain had performed desperate first aid on a dying man not much more than 24 hours earlier. They only saw the physical scars of a camp Napier assumed the police had established only because it had been so scrupulously cleared. There wasn’t a single item of debris, not a sweet-wrapper or a cigarette butt. They came upon the cobbles of the old Colony dock. They pressed on the few hundred metres inland to the remnants of the expedition compound.
Lucy had spoken to McClain only the previous day. She hadn’t yet learned of his death. A private plane had taken them directly to Stornoway. Their flight had departed before news of the sinking broke. They’d been forbidden during it to use their phones. At Stornoway Harbour they’d rigged the R.I and set off on the seaward stretch of their journey. Internet surfing on a smartphone wasn’t a practical proposition aboard that kind of craft making better than 20 knots. And on the island itself, there was no phone signal.
What she had learned from McClain was that the comms centre was the only part of their old compound still intact and therefore theoretically habitable. In the pack on her back there was a compact but very powerful radio transmitter. It was state of the art communications hardware, a working prototype she’d had to get the paper’s tech editor to agree to review before she’d been lent the kit. These items weren’t even on sale yet, the review was embargoed until September, but because they’d promised to run it as a half-page, a corresponding transmitter now sat in the Chronicle’s newsroom.
They un-shouldered their packs, gratefully, in the comms room. Edith unpacked a small gas burner, her priority the brewing of a decent mug of tea each. Lucy started to assemble the transmitter, screwing in its thick, stubby aerial, fitting the battery into its cylindrical slot. Napier checked on the integrity of their shelter, inside and out. The rest of the compound was pretty much wrecked, ribbons of torn fabric flapping forlornly around titanium struts, the once gleaming metal dulled by exposure to years of scouring elements.
To his surprise and relief, the building was still strong and relatively sturdy. It would make an adequate shelter for the duration of their stay, roomier than the tents they’d bought and thought to use at a push. He could rig a floor to ceiling screen to give the women privacy and their living quarters would still be spacious enough.
He went back inside and watched his wife fiddle with the transmitter. He thought she was going to be mightily pissed-off when their investigative search drew the blank he was confident it would and she was forced to conclude that the retreating writer group had fallen victim only to a freak Atlantic wave.
‘We’ll get a meal inside us and check out the Colony settlement,’ she said, like someone in charge, which she was. ‘We need to get up there with plenty of daylight for the return trip but that’s more than do-able in this weather at this time of the year. I want to file tonight, an atmospheric 1,000 words even if we find fuck-all, with a teaser about the Shanks cottage for the piece I’ll do tomorrow.’
Napier didn’t think her professional prowess his wife’s most endearing characteristic. But if you wanted to succeed as a woman journalist in Fleet Street and weren’t content with being an agony aunt or writing recipes, you needed balls. And you needed bigger balls than all your male counterparts. It was a lesson Edith Chambers would quickly learn. He thought this was a side of her Auntie Lucy she had very likely never come across before.
The idea of revisiting the Shanks cottage wasn’t one that exactly had Paul Napier putting out the flags. Shanks had chosen the most tolerable spot on the whole island in which to site his crofter’s dwelling. The island could loom and glower studying its inland vistas, but he’d settled on the coast, and the property he’d so painstakingly built and so briefly occupied faced a pleasant view of the sea. It was whitewashed and charming from a safe distance. Closer-to it was derelict and dark enough to shelter unpleasant secrets.
The thought of touring the settlement though, which was their imminent objective, was much worse. It was a place of wretchedness and death that wore its miserable history in a huddle of bedraggled buildings cowering behind a wall. The stink of fear had not lifted from it since the time of Ballantyne, in Napier’s baleful opinion. It was restless, unstill. And when he’d been there before, he’d felt coldly and malevolently watched, studied like a bottled insect doomed to a brief life of confinement.
‘Penny for them,’ Lucy said to him, a harsh brightness to her tone he didn’t like. Was she being deliberately bombastic or was she bluffing, concealing some trepidation of her own? He really couldn’t tell. He’d grown that far apart from her.
He said, ‘I was just thinking pasta, or noodles, which is quicker and so lighter on our fuel. We’ll need to carb-load. The walk up to the settlement is boggy and then it’s rocky and where it’s rocky, it’s pretty steep. Noodles, we’ll take plenty of water and we’ll pack power bars.’
‘Such a practical man, Uncle Paul,’ Edie Chambers said.
‘Don’t you love him for it?’ Lucy said.
‘I love both of you,’ Edie said, missing the point completely, Napier thought, and being her adorable self with that innocence only the young ever possess.
And I love both of you, he thought, one of you despite myself. And I just hope to God there’s nothing left here that can bring harm to either of you. And if there is, I pray I’ve the strength and fortitude to protect you from it.
Phil Fortescue called Alexander McIntyre. McIntyre had taken him to New Hope in the first place, after McIntyre had also read the Horan journal that Fortescue had sourced to Barnsley. They’d made the crossing through a raging storm in a rusting tub of a trawler McIntyre had haggled over at a quayside pub in the port of Mallaig. It was an intense ordeal and had bonded them. He’d encountered then a brave and resilient man remorseful about exposing a group of innocents to something deadly. He wondered if history was about to repeat itself.
He’d grown genuinely close to Alex. They’d been almost like father and son until Jane’s death, when he’d severed his links with all of them because they all reminded him so unbearably of her. He’d realised something about himself lately it had taken Ruthie Gillespie’s alluring company to teach him. And it was that he’d wilfully allowed grief to turn the last two years of his life into a sort of death. The people who loved him, and there were two of them guests now in Ruthie’s garden, deserved better from him. Edie Chambers in particular, deserved far more than his self-indulgence had enabled him to give.
He didn’t get through straight away. There were protocols with men of McIntyre’s stature in the commercial world.
‘Tell him it’s to do with New Hope,’ he said. ‘Tell him its life and death. Tell him I’m not joking.’
Lassiter was also on his phone. He was talking to the police in the Western Isles. His expression told Fortescue that he was being sent around the houses, probably because it was a Saturday and he had no jurisdiction and some of the information he wanted would have to come from a forensics lab. But he’d get the answers he was after. He was tenacious as well as clever.
Ruthie was talking to Alic
e Lang. Their heads were close over the table between them, deep in discussion. Fortescue wished for a moment he could lip-read. He was anxious about Edie, impatient to speak to McIntyre and becoming curious generally about the world again in a way he hadn’t been for ages. What had Alice called it? It was a life of surprises.
His phone hummed in his hand and he accessed the call. It was McIntyre. He told him about what McClain had discovered in Ireland about Dennis Thorpe, who was really Dennis Shanks. He told him about what McClain had told Lassiter about the blood in the windowless church and the lonely death of Terry Conway. He didn’t have to tell him about what had subsequently happened to McClain, McIntyre had heard about that for himself on that morning’s radio news bulletin.
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘The Island is a dangerous place again. I’m on Wight with Alice and Patsy Lassiter. We want to get there as fast as we can and get Edie and Lucy and Paul out before Shanks realises he’s got company.’
‘He’s already got company,’ McIntyre said. ‘David Shanks filmed her in 1934. Patsy Lassiter tracked down the film for me.’
‘She’s welcome to him,’ Fortescue said, ‘if she’s still there. They probably deserve each other. But we’ve got to get Edie and the other two out.’
‘What about the Scottish police?’
‘They didn’t find him after a thorough search. McClain concluded he’d left New Hope – wrongly, given the end that McClain met with. And the Western Isles Area Command has funerals to arrange for seven of its best officers. They’re hardly going to stage a rescue mission now for people in no apparent danger who went there under their own steam.’
The Colony Trilogy Page 41