This was to prove the gravest miscalculation of her life.
Chapter Fifteen
Lassiter’s group made landfall on New Hope Island about 5 minutes after Ruthie Gillespie locked her cottage door. Her thinking about rubber boats had echoed McIntyre’s own concerning their arrival. He didn’t think Dennis Shanks necessarily capable of downing an aircraft with a malicious thought, but helicopters were delicate machines incapable of gliding. If their engines stalled and their rotors stopped, over land or sea, you dropped like a stone in the high-tech machinery surrounding you and you died.
They arrived aboard a rigid inflatable McIntyre had bought from a North Uist boatyard by phone the previous afternoon, immediately after chartering the chopper and about five minutes after he’d listened to Phil Fortescue’s travel demands. They cut the outboard engine about 500 metres from shore and Lassiter and Fortescue paddled them in. it was slightly surreal to McIntyre to see Commander Lassiter out of his habitual lounge suit. He was dressed in waterproofs and a watch cap and someone on Wight had provided him with a pea coat. He’d taken that off a moment before they began rowing. McIntyre had no argument with his facility with an oar.
‘You look like you know what you’re doing,’ he said.
‘Dragon boats on the Thames at Kingston,’ Lassiter said, ‘bonding sessions. Pretending to be Maori warriors is senior management’s idea of morale boosting among the Met’s top officers. I always want to pull a sickie and every year, Alice makes me go,’
‘She’s a wise woman,’ McIntyre said, smiling at Alice. He too wore a pea coat and a watch cap. He didn’t look costumed, like her husband did. He looked every inch the veteran sailor he was.
They came in on a rising chop. The weather was calm, but the sky had a dirty and sullen look and white froth was being whipped on the crests of wavelets increasing in number and size. The sea was dark green and gaining a fraught character as the wind strengthened. Had they been an hour behind where they were, McIntyre figured it might have been touch and go on the crossing. There was a storm coming. They were frequent and it was hard to predict their severity, but his experience told him this one was going to be blowy, vicious and unseasonably wet.
Fortescue rowed with averted eyes. He’d grunted no more than an initial greeting when McIntyre had clambered aboard to join them. That was okay, conversation wasn’t really possible above the chunter of rotor blades and they’d had a sleepless night and small talk didn’t really suggest itself. Matters were too tense. They did not know what they were going to find. Communication beyond the obvious would make more sense when they’d found it. McIntyre prayed silently in the fervent hope that what they discovered wouldn’t harden Phil’s obvious resentment towards him into something closer to hatred.
They beached and hauled their craft heavily up the shingle. The clouds were scudding now and growing in weight and velocity as they were hurled across the sky. Another half an hour, McIntyre thought, looking out at a sea beginning to boil beyond the shallows of the shoreline. That timing was fortuitous. We’ve been bloody lucky so far.
They weighed down their R.I. with stones, much as Napier had done the previous day and then concealed it as best they could with brush and heather sprigs and old spars of timber and fruit cases and other debris washed up there by the tide, this after they’d retrieved their bags from under its plank bench seats.
McIntyre unzipped his gun bag on the ground and took out a shotgun and offered it to Lassiter. Lassiter raised an eyebrow, but took the gun and the handful of cartridges that followed. He broke the gun’s breech and loaded it.
‘It’s for Napier. But I expect you know how to use one of these as well as he does.’
‘They’ve generally got shorter barrels by the time I come into contact with them. But there aren’t many firearms I haven’t handled at some point. Nothing as expensive as this, but when you squeeze its trigger, a shooter’s a shooter.’
‘Spoken like a ‘60s gangster,’ Alice said. ‘Ruthie Gillespie’s totally got your number, Patrick.’
‘Let’s get moving,’ Fortescue said. ‘I don’t think there’s any time to waste. And I wish we’d brought her. And probably not for the reason you’re thinking. She seems to understand Dennis Shanks better than the rest of us.’
She’s an instinct for this.
That’s the least of her talents.
Lassiter didn’t say so, but he thought Phil was right. They should have brought Ruthie. Not doing so was a tactical error. And wasn’t hindsight always 100 per cent?
They began to walk through a squall of rain towards their destination, which was the expedition compound. The Colony settlement was a crime scene. And it was Lassiter’s belief that no one sane could have taken shelter willingly in David Shanks’ cottage. And Lassiter was in charge. McIntyre, playing the penitent, had not yet challenged his authority. That was probably a temporary state of affairs because it was hard for a man such as him to change the habit of a lifetime. But for now, while he could, he was taking full advantage.
The compound appeared empty when they reached it. There were obvious signs of occupation in the old comms centre, but no sign of the three people presumably bivouacking there. An alloy tea kettle next to a Primus burner was still warm when he felt it against the back of Lassiter’s hand.
‘We should follow them,’ Fortescue said.
McIntyre said, ‘We don’t know where they’ve gone.’
‘I think it’s pretty obvious,’ Alice said. ‘They arrived here yesterday in time to go up to the settlement, which in yesterday’s calmer weather is what Lucy would have done. She’s a take the bull by the horns sort of woman and a born reporter. Even without knowing what we all know from McClain, she’d have assumed that’s where the action likely took place.’
‘Agreed,’ Lassiter said.
‘I’m supposing she didn’t find anything,’ Alice said. ‘Or she didn’t find anyway what it was she was looking for. So her next step would be the Shanks cottage. I’m with Phil on the hidden New Hope refuges, but Lucy no more knows where they are than the rest of us do. She’ll have gone to the crofter’s cottage, looking there for a lead.’
Fortescue said, ‘Paul Napier would’ve had had his say in what they were doing.’
‘No, he wouldn’t,’ McIntyre said. ‘Napier’s desperate to save a foundering marriage. He’ll do what Lucy tells him.’
‘I don’t believe that,’ Fortescue said. ‘He’s Edie’s Uncle Paul. He’s a good, brave man. He wouldn’t risk her safety.’
‘Maybe her safety was already risked here,’ Lassiter said.
The group around him was silent. The Kevlar walls sheltering them sighed and thrummed against their struts. Rain beat an incessant, furious tattoo on their roof. It was a little miracle the place had defied the elemental fury of the island for so long, but it had. You had to be grateful for small mercies.
‘We’ll go after them,’ Lassiter said. He looked at Phil Fortescue. ‘Of course we will. But first we’ll have a look around the compound, see if anything’s amiss. This is a dangerous place, more so if we’re wilfully blind to its hazards.’
The younger members of the group searched. McIntyre tried without success to get Lucy’s state of the art radio transmitter to work. The sounds emanating from it when he switched it on had a melodious insistence so droningly inhuman it forced him quickly to give up and switch it off again. Less than five minutes later Phil Fortescue found the body Napier had hauled into a patch of undergrowth, trussed-up in polythene and snugly bound by tight hoops of bungee rope.
They gathered around the corpse. The rain was a deluge and the wind a persistent shriek and it had become cold enough, in late June, for their breath to be visible to them when they exhaled into the chill.
‘Jennifer Spring,’ a voice from behind them said.
They turned. Lucy, Napier and Edie Chambers stood huddled together, Napier at their centre with an arm around each of the women because he’d been urging them like a scrum thr
ough the obstacles of wind and rain on their retreat from wherever they’d tried and evidently failed to get to. The women were pale, their hair plastered wetly around their faces, their drenched cagoules snapping and rippling with each shuddering gust. It was Lucy who’d spoken.
Phil Fortescue grabbed Edie and turned her back towards their shelter. The rest followed. McIntyre noticed that Napier and Lucy remained huddled, as one, as they took the short journey. He thought this an encouraging sign. He was looking for any consolation in being there, he knew, thinking there wasn’t much to find in a place where he sensed little but ominous threat.
They got back into the comms room. Napier explained the body, so far as he was able to, the dead woman’s intentions made graphically plain by the hunting knife he now wore tucked under his own belt. Lassiter, who had recognised Jennifer Spring immediately, told Lucy and Edie and Paul Napier about what McClain had learned in Ireland, about what he’d discovered in the settlement’s windowless church and about what had happened to him when he’d left New Hope two days earlier.
‘They burned our boat,’ Lucy said.
Phil Fortescue ran through his theory that there was somewhere to hide on New Hope, that David Shanks had found it and that the book he’d compiled had revealed its whereabouts to his grandson.
Alice made cocoa. Because they had time, because no one was going anywhere until the storm stopped raging in the way it was, she then told those of them unaware of it of what had happened in Shaftesbury, the cuff-links and the surprise return of a psychic talent she’d been relieved six years earlier apparently to see the back of.
Edie sipped from her mug. She said, ‘I told Uncle Paul and Auntie Lucy about Ruthie Gillespie last night.’
‘The one that got away,’ Lucy said, ‘in the sense that she never came.’
Edie said, ‘Why isn’t she here?’
‘I told her she couldn’t come with us,’ Lassiter said. ‘It was a mistake.’
Edie looked at Fortescue. She said, ‘Have you seen anything of her?’
‘He was at her cottage when we got there unannounced, yesterday,’ Alice said.
‘Phil, you devil, you,’ Edie said, kissing his cheek.
Lassiter said, ‘Where were you three trying to get to?’
‘The crofter’s cottage,’ Lucy said, ‘which was actually a waste of time because I think Phil’s theory is bang-on. There’s a storm shelter or a burial chamber somewhere on the island and this psychopath, Thorpe, Shanks, whichever’s holed up there. That’s the only explanation for two police searches, the second of them very thorough by the sound it, not finding him.’
‘He can make himself hard to see,’ Lassiter said.
‘Yeah,’ Lucy said, ‘the late Jennifer Spring did that yesterday evening. But we got a bit of help there, a bit of intervention.’
‘She died of shock,’ Napier said. ‘Or she died of fright. Without an autopsy, take your pick.’
There was a silence. The storm rampaged beyond their Kevlar walls, but within, nobody spoke. Then McIntyre said, ‘Since I alone here possess the gravitas of the elderly and am therefore the least likely to be publicly scorned, I’ll say what we’re all thinking. Your intervener was Rachel Ballantyne.’
A shudder ran through Lassiter that was nothing to do with the cold and Alice turned sharply towards him, sensing it. She was holding her cocoa mug. She reached and curled the fingers of her free hand into his.
Napier said, ‘Why would Rachel Ballantyne help us?’
‘I don’t know,’ McIntyre said. ‘I don’t know everything. But I do know no one here has slept since yesterday. I’d suggest you all sleep the storm out. Tired people make mistakes and none of us is going anywhere in this.’
‘Someone needs to keep watch,’ Lassiter said.
‘I’ll do that,’ McIntyre said. He picked up his shotgun and held it easily in the crook of his right arm. ‘Another of the compensations of being old is that one sleeps a lot less.’
He’s taking over, Lassiter thought. Maybe he should. How serious a mistake it would prove to be he didn’t know, but by now he was totally convinced that they should have brought Ruthie Gillespie with them. Maybe it was because she’d read and pondered on his fiction and maybe it was because she had an interest in the esoteric, but she definitely had an insight into Dennis Shanks the rest of them lacked. Probably it was simply because on two separate occasions, he’d attempted to give her the hard sell in person on a trip that would have guaranteed her own violent death. McClain said she’d disliked him on sight. On New Hope, now, Lassiter was missing Ruthie’s instinct.
Ruthie stood in the picturesque Edwardian shadow of Lewes station and smoked a cigarette. She’d had to tactfully fend off the stricken advances of a boy of no more than 19 on the journey, but that was one of the unfortunate consequences of looking younger than her age. She’d still managed to read a good chunk of Island Life as the train ate the miles. Reading a novel for the second time was always quicker than doing it the first time, even with a substantial gap between. She didn’t remember having noticed the dedication the first time around. It read:
For D.S. 1895-1970; mentor, teacher, guide.
Ruthie thought it technically incorrect to call someone a mentor when they’d died a good 13 years before your own birth, but she got the picture. David Shanks had taught his grandson some impressive tricks. He’d also posthumously corrupted him. What she’d suspected on meeting him was a slight sense of desperation probably brought on by writers’ block, had actually been his impatient ambition to get started on his ghastly, bloody, New Hope Island scheme.
And she’d come extremely close to falling victim to it. She hadn’t been wholly forthcoming with Nick McClain on that score. It was true she’d not taken at all to the man she now thought of as Dennis Shanks on the two occasions she’d met him, despite his good looks and the fact that she’d thoroughly enjoyed his novels. New Hope had seemed enticing, nevertheless. She thought somewhere so atmospheric and isolated might very well inspire her to write mature fiction. That was her next logical creative step. And her hundred quid deposit had been non-returnable. Also, sometimes, she wasn’t the most decisive of people.
In the end, it had come down to the toss of a coin and the feeling that followed. Heads she’d go, tails she wouldn’t and it was heads, except that the sight of the minted monarch’s profile flat in the palm of her hand sent despondency flooding heavily through her.
‘Like grief,’ she said aloud to no one, recalling it. It had felt like loss. She’d taken it though as a warning.
She put out her cigarette stub on the top of a bin conveniently designed for the purpose and picked up her bag and set off for the high street and the White Hart. It wasn’t far, but it was all uphill. Uphill, Ruthie thought, at that moment, wasn’t a bad summation of the progression of her life.
It was a Sunday and it was the holiday season. Andrea Thorpe’s shop was open from 11am until 5pm and Ruthie got there just after noon, after unpacking her one bag at the hotel and washing her face and brushing her hair and applying some fresh make-up. The ground floor of the premises was devoted to contemporary fiction, with separate ante-rooms for children’s books and biography. The basement was where the collectible stuff was displayed.
No one in the shop answered the description Alice had given her of its proprietor. The only staffers were two girls, neither of them older than about 16 and both with the glazed look of teenagers who hadn’t spent their Saturday night very sensibly, given what Sunday required of them. The shop was busy with browsing families paying a summer visit to an historic town. Though many of them could have been local, Ruthie thought, it was a literate spot, this. It wasn’t just Tom Paine; Virginia Woolf had drowned herself only a few miles away in the Ouse.
There were locked glass display cases in the basement and they contained what Ruthie supposed were the rare and collectable stock. There were first editions of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and a couple of Graham Greenes. She had
Brighton Rock, probably a popular choice. Greene’s standing had suffered in the years since his death, but his best known novel was set only 6 miles away from here and the copy on display looked unread.
Elsewhere in the basement there were quite a lot of early, illustrated versions of Peter Pan and other Edwardian children’s books. But there was nothing about magic claiming to be by an author named David Shanks.
I’m on a fool’s errand, Ruthie thought, admitting to herself that this had been a rather stupid hunch even by her habitually rash standards. She didn’t know whether she was looking for little more than a shop-bought note-book or something privately printed with gilt-edged pages and sumptuously bound in Morocco leather. She really had no idea. And it was crowded and stuffy down there. She was being jostled and felt claustrophobic under the hot lights. She decided she’d beat her retreat.
She was on her way out of the shop when a woman approached her in a cloud of Chanel perfume and a designer suit. She was looking suddenly into the cornflower-blue eyes of Andrea Thorpe, wrinkled with a smile at their corners. There’d been a photograph of her, taken a few years earlier, on the shop’s website when Ruthie had looked. Andrea took her elbow and steered her firmly around, back into the body of the shop.
‘Ruthie Gillespie, as I live and breathe,’ she said. ‘Don’t you dare leave without signing some stock. Better still let’s find you a desk and something to sit on and you can do a proper signing. I hope you’ve time? I wish I’d had the notice to publicise this.’
Ruthie felt flattered to be recognised. The big-name children’s authors did signings, or course. The biggest of them visited schools. Michael Morpurgo had schools visit him, at sell-out venues chosen by town councils and area education authorities. But most of Ruthie’s sales weren’t physical books, they were digital downloads. In a five-year career, she’d only done a handful of bookshop signings before.
She signed for an hour and a half. She sold a total of 60 books. She was amazed that Andrea Thorpe had so many copies of her titles in stock. She drank a cup of excellent coffee prepared by one of the assistants, brought partly out of her party-trance by this shift in her routine. And it occurred to Ruthie that the volume of reminiscences and spells compiled by David Shanks for his grandson if here at all, would most likely reside wherever his mother lived.
The Colony Trilogy Page 44