When she’d finished signing, having sold the last of her copies there, Ruthie got up to go and thank Andrea for her kindness.
‘Think nothing of it, dear. You’re good for business. The children are always thrilled, putting a face to a name. And such a pretty face. What brings you to Lewes?’
‘Kind of a cultural pilgrimage,’ Ruthie said.
‘How long are you staying?’
‘I’m leaving in the morning.’
‘Let me invite you to dinner tonight, if you’re free?’
‘I’m free.’ And this could prove a crucial opportunity.
Andrea Thorpe clapped her hands together, ‘Excellent,’ she said. ‘My son’s a novelist. I’ve a soft spot for fiction writers.’ She spread her hands, theatrically, gesturing at the shelves, ‘Obviously,’ she said.
‘I’m re-reading Island Life,’ Ruthie said, ‘it’s extraordinarily good.’
‘I won’t argue with you there, is seven-thirty alright?’
‘Where do you live?’
Andrea pointed at the ceiling. She said, ‘When you’re rare and collectible, it makes a huge difference to your insurance premiums. Like having a security guard and a Rottweiler rolled into one.’
Ruthie had gambled on a sunny day and brought her swimming costume. She fetched it from her hotel room in a cloth bag with a towel and some sun cream and her sunglasses and her book. She spent the rest of the day at Pells Pool, alternately reading on the grass at the lido’s side and swimming in its chilly, pellucid water. A White Magnum made do as a late, vanilla flavoured lunch. She got back to the White Hart at 6.30pm. She showered, changed and had a drink in the bar there, watching the High Street go by through the scrolled glass of the window. By then she only had a few pages remaining to be read of Island Life.
At 7pm Phil Fortescue brought out Alex McIntyre a hot drink. He said, ‘I’ll relieve you, if you like.’
McIntyre was huddled seated on a canvas camping chair inside a waterproof cape outside the only entrance to the compound’s one intact building. That was sheltering him from the worst of the wind. But the driving rain needled into anyone exposed to it without respite and for the time of the year, it was bitterly cold.
‘Think he’s doing this?’
‘No, I don’t,’ McIntyre said. ‘He probably wants us off the island as badly as we do. We’re not a part of whatever his plans are. We’re just a distraction.’
‘He almost certainly burned Paul and Lucy’s boat. He sent Jennifer Spring to murder Lucy.’
‘They went looking for him. Lucy’s one of the highest profile journalists in the country and he’d be media-savvy enough to have recognise her. It’s quite obvious though that we’re here on a rescue mission.’
‘Patsy would like to go after him.’
‘We’d have short-waves and dogs and torches. We’d have tasers and batons and there’d be three or four-times our number. Unless he’s stupid, he knows we’re not here to hunt him. And he’s not stupid.’
‘He might just act out of spite,’ Fortescue said.
‘He might,’ McIntyre said. ‘It’s why I’m freezing off my elderly balls out here.’ He sniffed at the hot liquid steaming in his mug. ‘I hate Bovril,’ he said. He sipped at it anyway. ‘Tell me about Ruthie Gillespie.’
Fortescue crouched down on his haunches. He thought for a long moment. Then he said, ‘There’s nothing about her I don’t like. There’s absolutely nothing I’d change. I’m not saying she’s perfect, there’s things about herself she’d probably think she could improve upon. But she’s unique and lovely and I wouldn’t want to risk losing that about her.’
‘It sounds like you’ve fallen pretty hard.’
He chuckled at that. He said, ‘If I have, I’ve landed pretty softly. I can’t wait to get Edie off this island. And then I can’t wait to see Ruthie again.’
‘Do you think she’s in danger?’
‘Patsy Lassiter does, Alex, and he’s a bloody good judge. He regrets leaving her behind alone, I know he does.’
‘What will she be doing now?’
‘She’ll be sitting in the early evening sunshine outside the Spyglass Inn at Ventnor, sipping at a gin and tonic and puffing on a Berkeley Menthol. And I wish I was sharing that table with her now.’
‘Bad habits,’ McIntyre said.
‘She’s 33, she’ll outgrow them. You drink brandy and you smoke cigars. How old are you?’
‘I’m old enough to know better.’
Fortescue put an arm around his shoulder and squeezed. ‘You’re the best of men, Alex,’ he said. ‘You’re a wonderful friend. I’m relieving you in half an hour whether you like it or not.’ He stood up and went back inside.
McIntyre felt warmth spread through him at the words Phil had just spoken because he knew they were sincerely meant. They were here because of his grim and petulant fuck-up in dispatching Lucy and their predicament was nowhere near certain. But he’d been glad to see Phil Fortescue restored to something closer to his original self than the grief-wracked figure he’d become over the past couple of years in his self-imposed exile from those who cared about him most.
He liked the sound of Ruthie Gillespie. He thought that this sounded serious, in the light-hearted, effortless manner in which serious romance was meant, paradoxically, to be. Phil was still young. Children were far from out of the question. Should that happen, and he admitted to himself it was a lot to assume at so early a stage, he’d be like a grandfather to them. That would be a new chapter for him, one he was ready for. It would be a new and joyfully welcome lease of life.
Such were the last thoughts Alexander McIntyre ever entertained. They were happy and speculative and abundant with the promise of the life he hadn’t yet lived. He didn’t hear the approach of his attacker. He saw no one and the howl of the wind and the patter of the rain on his oilskin covered the sound of them. The rock with which he was clubbed was swung down forcefully, crushing his spinal cord just above the nape of his neck, caving in the back of his skull and killing him instantly.
The sound of violence, the sudden crunch of collision with bone and flesh snapped Paul Napier awake. He was out of the comms centre like something uncoiling, reaching for his shotgun, taking in the slumped figure of McIntyre and picking out a shape outlined only by the rain it was obstructing as it fled. He raised his gun level and pulled each trigger in smooth succession, the butt shuddering into his shoulder with the punch of recoil, shot exploding out of the twin bores in two deafening percussive blasts.
A human shape clarified a dozen feet in front of him. The air was suddenly harsh in the rain with cordite. It drifted off on the wind. The figure was a woman. She was missing her right arm and shoulder and most of her head. He lowered the shotgun. Rain hissed on its hot barrels, turning to steam. She sank to her knees, arterial blood pumping blackly out of her. She was dead before she had time to fall on the little left of her face.
He could hear the others, scrambling out of their sleeping bags, the sound muffled because his unprotected ears had been slightly deafened by the shotgun blasts. Over to his left, at the edge of his peripheral vision, he could see a little girl, straw-haired, her face somehow incomplete, vaguely unfinished. She was gesturing for him to follow here. She was Rachel Ballantyne and he knew she’d left those words of welcome for them at the stable in the settlement. He swallowed. Had he any more to lose than gain? He put his shotgun down on the ground and before the others could exit their shelter and see him do it he was out of the old expedition compound and tracking a wraith in a nightdress gliding weightlessly over the peat.
Chapter Sixteen
There was one of those independent newsagent shops neighbouring the grandly ramshackle entrance of the White Hart Hotel and after some thought, having finished her drink, Ruthie went in there. As well as stocking every item of confectionary known to man, some of them tooth-torturers she’d assumed extinct for decades, the shop sold everything from mothballs to mousetraps. The two items she was after
looked a bit sun-faded, but that didn’t matter. The fact that they were old stock was reflected in the price. She took them up to her room and five minutes later, was ready to go out to dinner.
She thought it quite odd that Dennis Thorpe, or Dennis Shanks as Patsy Lassiter would have it, still lived with his mother at the age of 34. She knew from personal experience that writing didn’t pay in the way non-writers assumed it did. But he’d been relatively successful. Five years after the last of them had been published all his books were still in print. She remembered vaguely that a couple of them had been the subject of film options. They were also popular now with the owners of reader devices. He had hundreds of reviews on Amazon and was highly placed in the Kindle horror chart.
To a limited extent, he’d cracked the American market. He’d certainly earned enough to be able to rent somewhere of his own or buy a place cheaply priced by a short lease, even in this affluent bit of Sussex. But the retreat literature had contained the detail that he shared a home with his mum. It was possible he was devoted to his mother in a Norman Bates sort of way, which was a thought sinister enough to make Ruthie shiver as she rang Andrea Thorpe’s bell.
She’d been asked about her dietary requirements before the two women had parted earlier and had answered that she didn’t have any. So she wasn’t particularly surprised to see the table laid with steak knives when she was ushered into Andrea’s dining room.
They drank a gin and tonic aperitif apiece. They conversed in a vague way about trends in children’s fiction. The first course was crab soup. It was Cromer crab, Andrea informed her guest and came from Norfolk, to which Ruthie truthfully replied that it was delicious, as was the wine, a perfectly chilled Chablis she thought probably bought earlier that day from the bespoke shelf at the Waitrose branch boasted by all affluent little English towns.
The steak was sirloin. It was served with an artichoke salad, which slightly disappointed Ruthie, who liked artichokes well enough, but honestly preferred her steak served with chips. There was a lull in the conversation. Andrea struck cross-hatched blows on her steak, cutting it into neat little diamond shapes. Either the meat was exceptionally tender, or the knife very keenly edged. Perhaps it was a combination of both.
Without looking up from her dinner table surgery, Andrea said, ‘Did that nosy detective and his psychic wife send you because her efforts failed to deliver anything on me?’
‘Nobody sent me,’ Ruthie said.
Andrea lifted meat to her mouth and chewed. Her lipstick had an orangey cast and her fury made the muscles in her jaw ripple, containing it. Ruthie felt cold, suddenly. She said, ‘You knew I was coming.’
‘I might stock three copies of your paperbacks, dear. At a push, mind, I’m no fan of dreary whimsy aimed at 10 year-olds, but 60 books? I mean, do me a fucking favour. You’re more stupid than you look. And that’s saying something.’
‘How did you know?’
‘Dennis predicted it. After you pulled out of the retreat but before he left for New Hope, he warned me that the disappearance of the group would provoke you, since you’re someone both vain and inquisitive, to poke around. He was right. He usually is. And now you’re here with a debt to honour.’
Ruthie didn’t respond. She was thinking hard but verbalising would impede that process and there might not be much time.
‘What do you know about chaos magic, Ruthie?’
‘Not much. The power is said to come from affronting common decency.’
‘So you might derive it from wilfully butchering people known for their good deeds. Or you might have an ordained priest commit murder on a Sunday. It’s Sunday today.’
‘It isn’t just about killing,’ Ruthie said. ‘It’s acts that outrage convention.’
‘Let me tell you a story,’ Andrea said. ‘Once upon a time, a man named David Shanks had two children. They were a girl and a boy and they were twins. He had scant interest in fatherhood at 53, when they were born and no regard at all for fidelity. The girl was brought up by her mother, knowing about her brother. The boy was fostered. And though he saw his father from time to time, David never told Peter about Andrea’s existence. Can you see where this is going?’
‘It’s headed towards Dennis Thorpe’s conception.’
‘See? A bit of encouragement and even you can join the dots.’
‘You deliberately seduced your own twin.’
Andrea grinned. A blob of meat gristle glistened, wedged in a gap in her teeth. ‘It doesn’t get more chaotic than that, Ruthie. It gave our progeny an immense gift for magic.’
‘Incest isn’t magical, it’s squalid and perverted,’ Ruthie said.
‘It was quite an achievement, I can tell you. It’s easy to engineer an encounter with an insurance agent if you own a shop where you can contrive a couple of apparent break-ins. You’ve a ready-made justification, almost a calling card. But Peter Shanks had very little interest in women and he had to fuck me while I was at the most fertile point in my cycle. He was cautious to the point of being unenthusiastic. Fortunately, he was also prone to premature ejaculation. Anyway, the occasion produced the desired result. It was a success.’
‘Depending on how you define success,’ Ruthie said.
Andrea was still grinning. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’ll not be lectured on morality by a scribbling tattooed floozie. Life’s much too short.’
Ruthie said nothing.
‘Goodbye, Ruthie.’
Andrea reached into her pocket. As she did so, her hair appeared to soften and melt on her head, collapsing inward and Ruthie saw that her outline was becoming indistinct as her substance began to fade and diffuse rapidly to a gauzy, transparent nothing.
Ruthie stood. From her own pocket she took out the water pistol she’d bought at the newsagent’s shop and filled from a bottle of Parker ink. She aimed and squirted it and spatters of ink shaped themselves across the otherwise unseen shape of Andrea Thorpe. She squirted ink at Andrea’s face, hoping to splash it into her eyes. She put the pistol onto the table and strode across and took a heavy paperweight from where she’d earlier inventoried it on the room’s mantelpiece. Ink dripping from Andrea’s ear lobe helped her aim. Ruthie brought back her arm with the elbow rigid and swung hard and whacked the palmed paperweight into Andrea’s left temple with an audible thud.
Two things happened. Ink stained, Andrea became visible again and she fell heavily onto the table top and then was pulled by the dead weight of her legs and her own momentum onto the carpeted floor. She lay prone there, unconscious, holding something in her right fist that looked like a duffle coat toggle. It was tied to a length of what looked like fishing line, which ended a yard or so later in a toggle identical to the first. The line was serious. It looked strong enough to land a marlin.
Ruthie knew what this implement was. She had seen a documentary on television about the British WW2 soldier and sometimes mystic Orde Wingate, who’d founded and led the Chindits in their guerrilla campaign against the Japanese in the jungles of Burma. They’d had to find ways to kill silently. The Chindits had used what Andrea Thorpe held in her hand. They were called garrotes. It was a weapon designed to strangle its victim, pounced upon from behind. You gripped the toggles and the cord bit into the skin in a way that made it impossible for your victim’s fingers to pry off.
Ruthie washed the dishes and two glasses and utensils she’d used. She wiped the paperweight clean. She looked for but didn’t find any of her own hair in the dining room. She thought about looking for Dennis’s bedroom and seeing if his grandfather’s book reposed there. But having learned what Andrea had told her, she no longer thought Dennis had a room of his own here. Chaos magic; convention outraged. It was sordid and perverse, but at least one mystery had been solved.
She carried out a thorough search anyway for the book. Locating it was after all the reason she’d accepted the dinner invitation. There was a study, a neat room masculine in its minimalist character she thought probably to do more with Dennis than
with his mother. Books were present there placed precisely on metal shelves but none of them was the volume she had gone there hoping to find. There was none of the apparatus or paraphernalia of magic there either. The one picture on the study wall was a vintage black and white photo of a jazz band. The caption told Ruthie they were the Quintet of the Hot Club of Paris.
The bathroom on the floor where they’d begun the meal they’d neither of them finished, was innocent. So were all but one of the other rooms in the quite spacious flat, blandly furnished in a manner that suggested trips to IKEA in an estate car Ruthie figured would be an Audi or a Volvo.
The exception to all this conventionality was the wet-room off Andrea Thorpe’s bedroom. That wasn’t normal at all. It was lit by yellow candles, heavily aromatic, and Ruthie counted six of them. Lying on the floor was a sturdy looking leather basque. It laced up the back. Where the shoulder straps would usually be, this item was attached to twin ropes laced through a pulley screwed to a metal plate on the wet room’s ceiling. Incense rose pungently in wafts from an ornate burner glowing with heat on the tiles in one corner. Beside it, the contents of a knife-block, knurled metal handles above shiny blades, glimmered wickedly in the waxy light.
The leather of the basque had been ornately carved or engraved with symbols that looked runic, to her inexpert eye. They were frenzied and strange. There was no need to try it on for Ruthie to know that this ceremonial artefact had been prepared in her size, in readiness for her torso. She’d have been hoisted by the pulley and suspended by the ropes where Andrea Thorpe would have gone to work on her body with the knives. The garrote hadn’t been to kill her, only to choke her into unconsciousness for a more stylised fate.
The Colony Trilogy Page 45