Alice said, ‘So he really can’t bring the chopper down?’
Ruthie swallowed wine. ‘Not without a surface to air missile he can’t, and I doubt he’s got one of those.’
‘So we can go in all guns blazing,’ Fortescue said.
‘No, Phil, you can’t,’ Ruthie said. ‘They’re incredibly dangerous just with the spontaneous stuff they can do. You can’t predict them. You need to be right under their radar. I think you have to land on the nearest inhabited island to New Hope and approach it discreetly in paddled rubber boats. I really do.’
‘I think Ruthie’s spot on,’ Lassiter said.
‘I am, Commander. But you’re still not taking me. It’s ridiculous. It’s an outrage, actually.’ She stood.
Fortescue said, ‘Where are you going?’
‘To my kitchen, for gin,’ Ruthie said. ‘White wine never does a proper job.’
‘You’re making a wise man of me, Ruthie,’ Lassiter said.
She said, ‘No one likes a smart-arse.’
Alice cracked and laughed aloud at that. And Lassiter was grateful for the way in which Ruthie had lightened the mood in her outrage and disappointment. She was a drinker. He’d been a drunk, so he knew the crucial distinction. When their helicopter touched down and they left to board it twenty minutes later, the parting hug he gave her, taking his turn at the end of the short queue, could not have been more grateful or meant.
She’d stalked them patiently. She’d waited for them to separate, expecting the physical breach would occur sooner, philosophical when it hadn’t, biding her time. They couldn’t see her, which was not just an advantage but an essential requirement, since the man among them was so tense and powerful looking and alert. He was prey to her, all three of them were. But he had about him more of the hunter than the hunted and that quality had to be respected, if success was to be achieved.
The settlement had been her killing ground of choice. But that hadn’t worked out, given their jumpy, stressed-out choreography in Ballantyne’s blighted Kingdom of Belief. So she’d trailed them back, doubtful they would hear her, fatigued and preoccupied and concerned above all else with their safe descent.
Now, they’d separated. The man and the girl had emerged from their shelter to perform some ritual task meant to ensure their security. That’s what it looked like, anyway. And in doing so, they’d left the hostile, sharp-tongued woman alone in their shared refuge.
In earlier times, this woman was what would have been called a shrew. She’d have been due the harsh indignity of the ducking stool as the punishment for her berating nature. She was about to suffer a worse and more permanent fate than that. But she was deserving of it. She married arrogance and ambition in a manner that begged retribution from the fates. Except that she wasn’t dealing with the fates, she was at the mercy of a more immediate and compelling power that those.
Invisible, she closed on her prey. And then she became aware of someone watching her. The hairs rose despite her self-assurance on her neck in hackles of urgent fear. Despondency gripped pulling at her bowels. Something shrank in her and she knew it was ambition and hope, diminishing.
‘Hello,’ said a whispery voice.
She turned. She was Jennifer Spring. She was strident and sometimes loud and had an aggressive confidence about her. And that had been enhanced, in recent weeks, by the perfecting of their scheme and their subsequent rituals. Hunting down her human targets here, she’d felt so strong she’d considered herself invulnerable, her plan to gut the abrasive bitch in the shelter before the other two could return to her. She was more confident than ever in her ability to evade capture – the attempts of the police search patrol had been almost comical to watch. She meant to disembowel the woman and leave her entrails exposed, glistening and still warm for her companions to see when they returned.
The voice belonged to a little girl and had come from directly behind her. She turned, aware of the musty, sweetish reek of decomposition. The figure she saw did not belong in life. It was ragged and incomplete, its features vague and poorly assembled, as though only remembered carelessly by someone still a child.
They were at eye level with one another, only a few feet apart. Except that the figure in front of her had no eyes, just shadowy sockets staring blackly. Jennifer was a tall woman, an imposing quality she’d used to intimidate successfully in uniform, in the customs officer post she’d recently left. The little girl, by contrast, wasn’t tall. She was frail and ragged and petite and owed her height only to the fact that her feet, filthy and trailing the hem of her nightgown, did not appear at all to need to rest upon the ground.
Her thighs were suddenly warm and wet inside her snug and practical combats. Jennifer was aware she’d lost control of her bladder and pissed herself, the urine gushing out of her. She said, ‘How can you see me?’
The thing hanging in the air in front of her said, ‘I see everything.’ Its voice was the sough of night wind stirring dead leaves. Jennifer had begun to shake. The knife in her hand slipped with a dull clunk onto the stony ground, her palm too moist to keep a grip on it.
‘Your captain has protected himself against me. He’s learned some precautions, since the last time, when I chased him away for sport. He hasn’t aged a day, which is uncommon strange.’ The apparition seemed to ponder. It canted its head almost onto one bony shoulder and its gash of a mouth stretched into a leering wound. ‘He hasn’t protected you, though, my dear.’
‘Who are you?’
‘There’s a riddle,’ the thing said. It spread its scrawny arms and the whiff of it blossomed loathsomely. ‘This is how I remember being, once, long ago. Let me show you how I am now really.’
Forty feet away, inside the comms centre, Lucy Church heard a sudden, single deafening scream followed by abrupt silence. Paul and Edith must have heard it too because seconds later she heard them sprinting across the ground as they approached the source of the sound. She went outside. She saw Paul and Edie standing next to an inert figure in combat fatigues lying face down on the ground.
She watched her husband kneel down and flip the body onto its back. She’d seen enough in her days of war reportage to recognise that he was handling a corpse. Still warm, recently vocal, this was someone nevertheless emphatically dead.
Lucy approached. She stood between Paul and Edie and studied the woman’s face. She’d been what those prone to cliché would call a handsome woman. She’d possessed strong features. In death, they were contorted into a look of abject fear. There was a powerful smell of urine and it was still fresh. She’d clutched at the ground in her death-spasm. There were blades of grass caught between the fingers of both clenched fists.
In a shaking voice, Edie Chambers said, ‘Does anyone actually die of fright?’
‘She did,’ Napier said. ‘All three of us heard her.’
‘That’s a hunting knife on the ground beside her,’ Lucy said. ‘And you didn’t sense her approach, Paul. She got within forty feet of her target and you didn’t spot her doing your perimeter check. I find that hard to believe.’
He raised an eyebrow and shrugged. He didn’t understand it either, but his mind was on what had scared this woman to death. Her dying scream was still echoing shrilly through his head. It had been an ancient sound, a primeval cry of pure terror.
‘She was Jennifer Spring,’ Lucy said. ‘She was on Dennis Thorpe’s retreat, so they’re some of them still here, presumably and not all dead. Why was she hostile towards us?’
‘Someone has burned our boat,’ Edie said, looking at Lucy.
Napier caught the neutral tone, thinking it contagious. Maybe he should give it a go. Trouble was, he didn’t feel neutral at all. He said, ‘Alex McIntyre’s made a bad mistake sending you here, Lucy. And you’ve made a bad mistake bringing Edith. We’re clueless and defenceless and totally out of our depth.’
She looked up from the corpse at her husband. She said, ‘Protect us, then. It’s your job. You’re supposed to be strong and resour
ceful. They’re among the qualities that made me fall for you in the first place.’
These were the first honest words he felt she’d spoken to him since their arrival on the island and despite everything, he found them encouraging.
‘We’re on our own, by the way,’ Lucy said. ‘No way of calling the cavalry. That radio transmitter might be state of the art, but it’s not working here. It’s totally fucking useless. Sorry for the language, Edie.’
‘Nothing I haven’t heard or said before,’ Edith said.
Napier said, ‘No signal at all?’
‘No communication,’ Lucy said. ‘You switch it on and it makes a noise and that’s all it does. It’s perfect, if all you want to do is listen to what sounds like a folk song sung at a séance.’
There was a polythene groundsheet in Napier’s rucksack. He’d go through the clothing for ID and any valuables and then truss up the corpse and store it out of sight. He had one practical job and two mysteries on his mind. Actually three mysteries, assuming Jennifer Spring was solving the fourth posthumously by being their burned boat culprit.
Why had she tried to attack them? What had scared her so badly she’d died of shock? And how had she got to within feet of them armed with a bloody great hunting knife, without him being aware of her approach?
He searched the pockets of the garments clothing the stiffening corpse. Then he lifted and examined her hands and sniffed at them.
‘What’re you doing?’ Edie asked.
‘She’s carrying no matches or lighter or bottle of accelerant and her fingers don’t smell of smoke or petrol.’
‘What does that prove?’
‘It doesn’t prove anything definitively. It suggests that she’s not our only enemy here.’
Alexander McIntyre waited for the helicopter clattering northward through the night sky. New Hope had been at the forefront of his mind since his rash and petulant decision to send Lucy there in the care of her doting husband. He had no doubt about Paul Napier’s skills or courage. But crude emotional blackmail had been used to leverage their joint departure and he’d been the one doing the blackmailing. And Lucy had compounded his sin by taking Edith Chambers along.
McIntyre hadn’t known in advance about that. He didn’t micro-manage as a rule. It had been out of character for him to intervene and send Lucy off on an assignment. Generally, his editorial floor acted with full independence and autonomy. The decision to allow an intern to shadow their star features-writer was not something anyone would have bothered him with. He’d been honestly ignorant of that important detail.
But Edith was there because he’d sent Lucy and if the danger they faced on New Hope was as real as his instinct now insisted it was, he’d be entirely to blame if any harm came to them. Their lives were young and vital and precious. He knew too that if anything awful happened to Edie, Phil Fortescue would never forgive him.
Their voyage aboard that rust bucket of a boat five years earlier from Mallaig to New Hope lived in his memory as the moment of his whole existence when McIntyre had been most alive. He’d taken the wheel and they’d headed out from the harbour into one of the worst storms in living memory. There’d been just the two of them, him and the lanky Liverpudlian maritime scholar, at the sea’s mercy, only his seamanship and the nerve the pair of them shared to keep them afloat as they chugged through the tempest to confront the evil there and rescue the survivors on the island.
He would lose Phil, if anything happened to Edith. That would be inevitable. And Phil was as close in a man he’d ever come to having a son. Phil didn’t know it, but McIntyre had left him everything. Except that he suspected now that everything, to Phil Fortescue, was personified in the step-daughter McIntyre’s hubris had placed in jeopardy.
He was on the balcony at the boathouse. McIntyre always stayed in the boathouse when he stayed at the Ardanaiseig Hotel. If it wasn’t available, he didn’t go there. It overlooked Loch Awe and had a view of the mountains rising magisterially on the far shore. It was a location on a scale that reminded you of how small and insignificant you were in the epic scheme and scale of things. He knew that was a lesson you could never learn enough when you were a man with an ego the size of his.
He kept a set of guns at the hotel. They were sporting guns, double-barrel 12 bores and he’d had them hand-made in St James some decades earlier at considerable cost. He’d hunted then, which he didn’t any more. These days he preferred to study wildlife through binocular lenses rather than through sets of gun-sights. But sessions on the clays kept his eye in and he was still an excellent shot. They were in an oiled walnut case with about 80 cartridges in a leather bandolier. He’d put the guns and the ammunition in a canvas gun bag before boarding the chopper. Weight was always a consideration aboard aircraft. One of the guns was for him and the other intended for Paul Napier.
McIntyre had never killed a man. But his wealth had been self-made. His father had skippered an ocean-going trawler out of Aberdeen. It was how he’d learned to handle a vessel and when he’d absorbed the lore and values of the sea. If what he’d been told was true about the manner of the police and volunteer deaths aboard the boat sunk the previous afternoon, he thought there only one punishment worth meting out to David Shanks’ grandson. He could expect little mercy from McIntyre and if he hurt Edie Chambers, he’d get even less.
Ruthie woke early, having drunk nothing stronger than Evian water once Phil and Alice and Patsy bloody Lassiter had departed her cottage for Scotland. She came awake and assessed the damage done by tobacco and alcohol by running a tentative tongue around her mouth. Sometimes this was an experience so alarming it required real fortitude. But this morning the damage inventoried didn’t seem too bad at all.
She remembered the events of the previous evening and uttered an audible groan of disappointment. Then she sat up, threw off the covers and swung her legs out of bed. Today was not going to be a sedentary plod through her self-imposed word-count total. Nor was she going to spend it moping dejectedly around the seafront wishing she were elsewhere. Because she knew she was sometimes prone to self-pity, she had all sorts of strategies for avoiding it. And today she had a mission to accomplish she thought might provide a concrete result.
Ruthie showered and dressed and then studied the route and the times of the trains to get her to Lewes in Sussex. She booked a room for the night at the White Hart Hotel so that her visit would be calculated and thorough rather than hasty and rushed. While Phil Fortescue and Patsy Lassiter had been busy on their phones the previous afternoon, Alice had told her in some detail about her visit with her husband to see the bookshop owning woman who was mother to Dennis Shanks.
There were things Alice hadn’t thought quite right about Andrea Thorpe. She’d drawn a blank with her psychically, which could have been her son’s deliberate doing. But it was as a psychiatrist rather than as someone with second-sight that she’d had her reservations and suspicions. The way she’d put it to Ruthie was that Andrea was somehow less than the sum of her parts. People like that were generally concealing quite a lot either from themselves, or from the wider world.
Ruthie hadn’t just liked Alice immediately, she’d been impressed by her too. But a vague suspicion about Shanks’ mother wouldn’t in itself have been enough to get her to Lewes. It was a hunch about the book Dennis had inherited and his grandfather had compiled. She didn’t think that Dennis would have risked taking so unique and valuable a tome amongst his luggage to New Hope. It would too easily risk loss or damage somewhere so wild. She thought it likelier hidden in plain sight and where better for it than the sanctity of his mother’s bookshop?
If she had that book in her possession, Ruthie thought she would be a match for Dennis Shanks. Not with the consequent magic of which he was capable, he’d gained the power for those achievements darkly and bloodily, through his ritual killings. She could never compete with him there. But with the spontaneous, with what she regarded as his party tricks, she was more hopeful. She thought if she coul
d find the formulae for those accomplishments, she could sabotage or reverse them. Like her new friend Alice Lang, she was a believer in fate. And one way or another, she thought she was destined to go to New Hope.
Before she left home, she took her copy of Dennis Thorpe’s Island Life from her bookshelf. His fifth and most recent novel, to her mind his best, was not only set somewhere remarkably similar to New Hope Island, but featured as its central character someone uncannily like the man she hadn’t known when she’d first read it was his real-life grandfather.
She thought there’d be valuable clues in its pages if she re-read it now. They would not have been deliberate clues at the time of writing. The book had been published in hardback five years earlier, which meant the story had to have been completed at least six years ago. But there would still be clues, detailed there as boasts and compelled by his vanity. All writers of fiction were guilty of vanity, to some degree, in Ruthie’s view. Thorpe, who was really Shanks, more than most, she was sure.
Her own status as a published writer was her calling card on Andrea Thorpe. Her books were popular. She wasn’t in the same league as Michael Morpurgo or Michele Paver, nothing like, but she made a modest living at it. If Andrea sold children’s books – and she did, Ruthie had checked – she’d have some Ruthie Gillespie titles in stock. Not all booksellers liked novelists, but most of them had time for the ones successful enough to have lured customers into their shop and to have made them some money by so doing.
Outside her door, locking it, Ruthie shuddered. She had just remembered what Patsy Lassiter had said about her books being a force for good. To his precise and analytical mind it was the reason she’d been singled out for inclusion at the retreat. She wondered would Andrea Thorpe share the same poisonous, malevolent view about the value of her work. She thought it improbable.
The Colony Trilogy Page 43