‘What do you want?’
‘You have a duty of care to Lucy and Paul.’
‘Agreed, I do.’
‘Charter a chopper and get us there.’
‘Fine, but you’ll have to divert en route to Ardanaiseig.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s not far out of your way.’
‘Yes, but why?’
‘I’m at the hotel there now. And if I’m paying for the ride I’m coming with you.’
When Fortescue ended his call, he saw that Patsy Lassiter had also concluded his. To the whole group Patsy said, ‘Two blood groups, but three victims. The DNA samples prove the blood in the settlement belonged to Debbie Carter, Suzie Ford and William Thompson. The blood volume means they’re certainly dead. I’m reserving judgment on whether Shanks is capable of magic. I’m skeptical enough to need to see the proof. But he’s definitely a psychopath.’
‘If he discovers them there, he’ll kill them,’ Alice said.
‘I’m repeating myself in saying Paul Napier’s a formidable man,’ Lassiter said. ‘It’s true, though. He’s as tough as they come.’
‘But he’s only human,’ Fortescue said.
Ruthie said, ‘Police searched the island when that fishing boat first reported the retreat camp in disarray and then again more thoroughly two days ago. Some of them stayed overnight. Even if Shanks and the two women can become invisible, where are their sleeping bags and food hidden? Where’s all their stuff?’
‘That’s a very good question,’ Lassiter said.
And it was one Phil Fortescue had already pondered over.
Like everyone else, in the run-up to the New Hope expedition, he’d read the stories about it written by Lucy Church in the pages of the Chronicle. Like everyone else, he’d been tantalised by the unexplained mystery of how Seamus Ballantyne’s community had vanished without trace.
Back then, Jane Chambers to him was a celebrity medic, a sexy and stylish virologist who’d made a series about The Black Death he’d bought on Blu-ray and watched about five times just because he fancied her so much.
She favoured a sudden and catastrophic outbreak of plague as the reason for the New Hope vanishing. She said so in the profile piece Lucy wrote about her. She said there’d be a mass grave filled with plague victims on the island and that she would find it and bone and hair analysis would prove her theory correct.
The telegenic forensic archeologist Jesse Kale was another popular broadcaster of the period, flashing his smile and flexing his pecs at atmospherically filmed sites of historic significance around the world. He too was a New Hope expedition recruit. And in Lucy’s profile of Kale, he too aired his pet theory about the vanishing.
He said he wanted to examine what meteorological data they had from the period of the New Hope settlement. He postulated that successive years of heavy Atlantic storms would force Ballantyne’s community to build a large and substantial shelter underground. He figured that the only way they could have all disappeared at once was to have perished together, when this structure subsided or collapsed and became their tomb, probably because persistent heavy rain had made its roof and walls waterlogged and unstable.
Neither of these theories had proven to be right. But both contained for Fortescue at least a germ of truth.
For better than a decade, the New Hope community flourished and thrived. It bred and grew. Yet there must have been fatalities in those years when something as simple as a tooth abscess could prove fatal. Appendicitis was a death sentence. There was no effective way to treat diphtheria or cholera or typhus and child mortality averaged a rate of 50 per cent even in healthy communities.
There were no graves on New Hope, but unless they were rowed out and buried at sea, the dead of the community, those that died naturally in the colony’s years of success, must have been interred somewhere. Jane’s mass grave was a fallacy, but somewhere on the island, Fortescue believed there to be a substantial crypt, or catacomb. There was a burial chamber there. Logic demanded it.
And though he’d thought Jesse Kale’s ponytailed, macho scholarly style a bit much, he thought the idea of a communal storm shelter a compelling one. The citizens of Ballantyne’s Kingdom of Belief would have faced adversity together. It would have been their natural and obvious response to an elemental ordeal.
He thought, consequently, that there were probably hiding places concealed on New Hope Island that had remained undiscovered and unexplored since the time of the vanishing. And as they waited for their ride through the sky to Scotland to arrive, he explained all this to Ruthie and Alice and Patsy Lassiter.
Lassiter listened slightly distractedly. He thought Phil’s theory ingenious, plausible and when you thought about it, obvious. Except that someone had discovered one or both of these places. David Shanks had done so back in the early 1930s. And he had described their hidden locations in the book he’d compiled and his grandson had received as a gift on his 18th birthday. Thus Dennis Shanks had been provided with a refuge where he could hole-up in secrecy. Nick McClain had taken death dogs to New Hope. Phil’s talk was making Lassiter think he’d have been better taking blood hounds.
Lassiter’s distraction was no reflection on Phil Fortescue’s reasoning or intellect. He had nothing but respect for both of those qualities. It was a consequence of debating with himself about Ruthie Gillespie. He hadn’t decided whether she would be safer going with them or staying behind on her own. He’d decided he was in charge, because someone had to be, or their mission would descend rapidly into chaos.
And the Ruthie decision would be his. It was already far too late for Phil to be objective about a woman he was so clearly falling for. And if the decision proved to be the wrong one, disastrously so, he didn’t want that on Phil’s conscience. Patrick Lassiter alone would shoulder the blame. It was his considered view that Phil Fortescue had already been burdened enough.
It wouldn’t begin in chaos, but their mission might end in tragedy. He’d never, a week ago, have even dreamed of returning to the remote and solitary granite nightmare that was New Hope Island. Now, despite the risk, he didn’t believe they had a choice. They’d been brought to this, enticed and then impelled, made choiceless by their own loyalties. It was what Alice would describe simply as the way things were meant to be. She’d known it immediately, the moment her unwanted gift returned to her in Shaftesbury, in the antiques arcade they’d been lured to there in Bell Street.
Lassiter listened with half an ear to Phil. And he pondered the conundrum posed by Ruthie Gillespie’s plight.
They made good time. They reached the settlement just after 4pm. The crime-scene tape flapping around the windowless church gave them a clue and the curdled blood on the floor within gave the area surrounding the building the pungent reek of an abattoir.
‘Doesn’t smell like the wash from a supertanker,’ Lucy said.
‘No,’ Napier said, ‘you’ve got a point.’
They explored the other buildings, the tannery and the distillery and the pitiful hovels Ballantyne had housed his misguided disciples in as they embraced poverty and worshipped a vengeful God and capricious mortal master in their blighted Kingdom of Belief. Napier watched Edie’s pretty young features struggle for composure at what he suspected was the uncertain loathing in her this place could provoke. He was angry at Lucy for having inflicted this on Edith. Love was a two way street and he couldn’t have felt more protective of Edie Chambers at that moment had she been his own flesh and blood.
‘Come and look at this,’ Edie said, in a small, tremulous voice.
She was about forty feet away from where Napier stood. She was slightly nearer to Lucy. She was pointing with an uncertain finger. They walked over to her, hurrying, both trying, Napier thought, to conceal their incipient panic. And both failing, he thought, though Edie was a long way beyond noticing that.
It was a stable, or it was a horse stall, not as grand as a stable, just a sort of lean-too with walls constructed from granite blocks
and a roof long torn away by its exposure at this altitude to the relentless winter gales of the Hebrides.
There were pebbles on New Hope, of course there were, multi-coloured and innumerable on the shingle strews of beaches, sparkling wetly under the summer sun when its tides receded. But there were no pebbles in the settlement. Or there shouldn’t have been, in the hinterland, there at the centre of the island, in the shadow of it heights.
These pebbles had been put there, carefully and individually placed on the stone-flagged stable floor. They were as smoothly uniform as buttons made of stone, each of them as black as obsidian. There were sufficient numbers of them to shape the message they described quite distinctly, despite the childish misspelling. They read,
Welcom Bak
‘We’re not alone here,’ Edith said. There was a tremor in her voice.
‘No one ever is, in this place,’ Napier said.
Lucy said, ‘If we didn’t have company, we’d have wasted our time in coming here. We haven’t wasted our time. I’m mightily relieved.’
They’d grown apart, but Lucy was a reporter, not an actress. To her husband’s ears, she didn’t sound relieved at all. He’d have said she sounded as scared and shaken at that moment as he felt.
The wind was strengthening, crooning and whistling through the ruins of the settlement, stirring the ancient straw on the flags around their misspelled words of greeting. It flapped and teased at their clothing and whipped the women’s hair about their heads, concealing and then revealing their faces in playful, antic gusts. They heard a single, keening shriek from the direction of the distillery and turned sharply to see a large, ungainly seabird flap skyward. Almost certainly the bird had made that sound.
‘I don’t think there’s any more to see,’ Napier said. He sounded deadpan, confident and for Edie’s sake, was grateful he did.
‘Yeah,’ Lucy said, ‘I’ve a thousand words to file for the early edition and they’re not going to write themselves.’
Napier nodded towards the pebbles. ‘Are you going to mention that?’
She shook her head. ‘I’ll write about that after we find out who wrote it. Tonight’s is just a colour piece.’
He’d put his foot over the glistening bit of organic matter he’d spotted on the ground before either of them had noticed it there. It was a human eyeball trailing from its tendril of optic nerve and he could feel it squirming under the sole of his boot. He thought it had probably been one of a pair and assumed the avian scavenger they’d just startled had flown away with the other one in its beak. It was only a theory, but eyes belonging to people generally came in twos.
He waited until Lucy and Edith were forty or fifty yards away from him, at the start of their long descent back to the compound, before he shifted his own feet. He was glad neither of them had seen the eye. It was repulsive and evidence of some savage act of mutilation and he thought they’d been disconcerted enough there already.
He muttered under his breath, roundly cursing Alexander McIntyre for his vanity and folly in ordering Lucy here on nothing more substantial than a grandiose whim. They were in danger and the threat was explicit and they were horribly unprepared for it. Edith Chambers was little more than a precocious child. Lucy was brave but weighed about 70 pounds soaking wet. The nearest his wife had got to a martial art was Pilates. None of them was armed.
Cloud clustered around the sun in the west made the light variable and their descent tricky. The way down was always more hazardous than the climb. You were more tired and more careless and controlling your speed and securing your footing were demanding skills over moss-covered slabs of rock canted at abrupt, uneven angles. But they got down okay. Both of the women were agile. Edith was young and the hard-living habits of their courtship days were ancient history for Lucy, who these days looked after her health.
Napier was relieved when they reached the compound. He felt similar to how he’d felt returning from a patrol that had passed without incident in Helmand Province. He didn’t think this neurosis or hysteria or even over-reaction. All his instinct, and he trusted it, told him they were somewhere not just dangerous but deliberately hostile.
He was working on a way in his mind to get them out as rapidly as possible. Lucy of course would refuse to leave. Abandoning her assignment might very well jeopardise her job. This put him in an invidious position because he felt responsible for Edith’s welfare and still didn’t really see her as an adult when it came to a decision as important as whether to stay or go; stick it out here or simply flee the place. Could he really take Edith and leave Lucy to her stubborn fate?
It was, anyway, too late to leave now. He wasn’t an experienced enough sailor for a night crossing in busy shipping lanes. It was a decision for the morning, when he would have to confront his wife.
Confront her with what?
There’d been a time when she’d trusted his judgment in such matters totally. Napier couldn’t pinpoint exactly when that time had gone, but he was certain it had. Most sane people would interpret the blood spill in the windowless church as a sign of grave physical danger. Lucy would see it only as a lead in what promised to be a sensational world exclusive. He’d hidden the other grisly relic for Edie’s sake. It would only have encouraged Lucy in her mission.
He took off his boots and gratefully accepted the tea Edith had just brewed for them all. He sat against the lumpy cushion of his unpacked rucksack and closed his eyes and sipped, with an eyeball, the pupil pale blue and dead, staring up at him blindly in his mind. He heard Lucy switch on her transmitter. In theory, because the kit was digital, there would be no squelch of feedback or crackle of static. She was going to dictate her piece. It was an admirably fluent skill and he didn’t know how she had the sheer mental stamina for it now.
Sound ululated out of the set and Napier opened his eyes. The tone didn’t really sound human, but he recognised the song being sung on some ghost frequency Lucy must have tuned into by mistake. Paul Napier liked his traditional music, much to the amused bafflement of his former comrades. He’d seen Kate Rusby twice at the Cambridge Folk Festival. Both times she’d sung this song, so it was familiar to him. Christ, he had the album. It was from Little Lights. It was Who Will Sing Me Lullabies. And it sounded lost and abject.
He drained his tea. The hoarse, whispered voice emanating, bleeding out of the radio transmitter was unendurable. He got wearily to his feet. ‘I’ll check the perimeter,’ he said.
‘Old habits die hard,’ Lucy said, in her new neutral tone Napier already detested.
‘I’ll come with you,’ Edith said.
They went outside. The temperature had dropped sharply and Edie hugged herself against the cold, shivering slightly. She waited until they were out of earshot of the comms centre and said, ‘I’d no idea.’
‘Nor me,’ Napier said, ‘until it was too late.’
She put her arms around him. ‘Oh, Uncle Paul,’ she said, ‘how did it get so bad?’
He couldn’t answer her. He thought if he tried, his voice would wobble with emotion and break with a sob. He didn’t even trust himself to look at her. He looked instead over her shoulder at a column of smoke rising blackly a few kilometres away, at what he knew with a clutch at his heart of cold certainty was their boat, burning, a pyre of hi-tech rubber and scrub kindling and with it, any chance of their escape.
Chapter Fourteen
To Lassiter, Ruthie said, ‘Obviously I like Phil and clearly I’m getting on with Alice. It’s important to feel comfortable among your house guests.’
‘Strictly speaking,’ he said, ‘a house guest is someone staying the night, like in Jeeves and Wooster, or a novel by Evelyn Waugh.’
‘I’m not sure I trust well-read policemen.’
‘A contradictory breed,’ he said, ‘so I don’t really blame you.’
She sipped more Chablis from her glass. None of her health-freak visitors were drinking anything stronger than coffee. She said, ‘You remind me of a villain from 1960s Lond
on in that haircut and suit, one of the Richardson Gang or someone like John McVicar, sinewy and ruthless. Not the Kray brothers. The Krays were a bit fat.’
‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’ Lassiter said. He knew it was anything but. He’d told her she wasn’t going to New Hope with them and it was fair to say she hadn’t taken it well. Phil Fortescue and Alice were observing this exchange with an amusement they could barely disguise. Alice had put on her sunglasses to conceal her expression but the dimples in her cheeks told her husband she was fighting not to grin. Phil was staring at the ground with a theatrical frown.
‘It was dangerous, calling a Kray Brother fat,’ Lassiter said.
Ruthie burped, ‘I know that. George Cornell called Ronnie a fat poof and got shot dead for it in the Blind Beggar pub on the Whitechapel Road.’
‘How do you know this stuff?’
‘My dad was an East End Cockney. His dad ran a flower stall at Columbia Road market. He had that pitch for forty years.’
Lassiter said, ‘You don’t sound like a Cockney.’
‘I’m Ventnor born and was educated at a Surrey boarding school. I’m a Royal Russellian. I was on the cadet force there. I can field-strip an assault rifle in a blindfold. I’m not a wimp.’
Fortescue had wondered about the refinement in her voice. Now he understood its origin.
‘You’re making a mistake, leaving me here, stranding and abandoning me.’
‘On balance, it’s the safest option,’ Lassiter said.
‘I know more about magic than you three put together. Not second-sight, like Alice’s got, that’s just a random gift.’
‘Or a curse,’ Alice said.
‘I’m talking about black magic.’
‘Goths know no more about magic than anyone else, love,’ Fortescue said. ‘You just look like you do.’
‘First off, I’m not a Goth. Second, I’ve studied the subject. So I can tell you with some certainty that Dennis Shanks won’t be able to bring down your helicopter so soon after sinking a large and seaworthy boat. He’ll always have the spontaneous to hand, which makes him dangerous, but the consequent? Killing Nick McClain and his people will have taken a lot out of him. He’ll need time to recover.’
The Colony Trilogy Page 42