She let herself out having assured herself there was no CCTV anywhere in the vicinity to record her presence there. She dropped the water pistol, having wiped its grip, into a street grid. She called the police anonymously from a high street phone box. She knew she hadn’t killed Andrea because the woman’s sonorous breathing, steady and strong, had been the soundtrack to the search for stray hairs of her own on the carpet and chair she’d occupied.
She wanted Andrea to have to explain what a bookseller was doing ink-spattered and unconscious, clutching a garrote. She wanted the contents of wet-room inventoried and photographed and Andrea interrogated under caution about all that. She wanted the incident written up and recorded on a computer file. She wanted Andrea Thorpe to become a person known to the police, because then she’d remain that for the rest of her life. She’d be on their radar, always, because they never erased and they never forgot. She’d be a person of suspicion and her life might be blighted as a consequence. Ruthie very much hoped so.
Had she been the heroine of a crime novel instead of someone real, Ruthie knew she’d have taken the precaution of buying the ink and water pistol in separate shops, probably in separate towns perhaps in neighbouring counties. But she knew Andrea would not implicate her, because by so doing, once Ruthie began talking, she’d further implicate herself. Attempted ritual murder was a pretty big deal, even somewhere with a history as bloody as Lewes had experienced.
Now you’re here with a debt to honour.
Would Andrea Thorpe come after her? She’d have to come round first and she’d be handicapped by a severe concussion and further delayed by a fairly exhaustive police interview once they decided she’d regained sufficient of her senses to undergo questioning. She might do it in time, though. She’d seemed insanely determined. The only way to guarantee she wouldn’t was to successfully confront her son.
‘No pressure there, then,’ Ruthie said aloud to herself.
She reached her hotel room feeling surprisingly calm. She was concerned most about a remark that might have sounded careless, the one about an ordained priest committing murder, because the Very Reverend Mabel Farrow was on New Hope Island and today was indeed a Sunday. She hoped it had been a prediction, or a boast, rather than the statement of fact. Beyond that, she just prayed that the victim wasn’t Phil Fortescue. Or Edie Chambers, or Alice Lang, or even Patsy bloody Lassiter. The truth was, she liked all of them.
What could she do? She had no way of contacting the people on New Hope and warning them they were in danger. She thought such a warning would anyway be pointlessly belated by now. The frustrating truth was that she could yet do nothing practical at all.
It was only 9.30 in the evening. She took Island Life down to the White Hart’s bar and ordered a large single malt whisky and a packet of pistachio nuts and finished the final few pages. And she got from them the clue that would take her finally, irrevocably, to New Hope Island herself.
Chapter Seventeen
He’d slept in his boots and his combat fatigues because he’d considered himself on duty, in McIntyre’s employ and his paid protector as the man’s Head of Security. He’d failed to prevent his boss’s death. He’d return as soon as he could and do what he could to keep Lucy and Edie safe from possible harm.
In the meantime Edie had her doting and nowadays surprisingly strapping step-father and the group had Patsy Lassiter, a tough and resourceful man for whom Paul Napier had nothing but the highest regard. They had the shotgun he’d left behind and the second of the brace, which they’d recover from under McIntyre’s fallen body. He thought he’d made the right choice, following the spectral urchin to this spot. He thought he’d made the only choice, which had been no choice really at all.
There’d been a poncho in the hip pocket of his combat jacket and he’d put it on. It was absurdly cold for June, but the wind and rain were scouring off the North Atlantic Ocean and he was well aware it could be colder, wetter and wilder than it was. The weather wasn’t precedent-setting and eventually, the storm would blow itself out. He shivered, but in truth that had little to do with the temperature. His skin crawled with gooseflesh and his stomach felt scraped out with hollow fear.
She had gestured for him to sit in a shallow depression, quite high up so the drainage was good, sheltered slightly from the elements and with his back to her, because she muttered that she was too fearful to look at, antic and playful as evening encroached, mischievous and sometimes, she said, unpredictably wicked.
Her voice was a maudlin, inhuman whisper, her speech only rustily remembered, her language antique and terrible for the endless years of island solitude it spoke of, for which she had been dragged innocently out of her time and rightful destiny. He was afraid of her, of course. But her plight was wretched and unasked for and in his heart, he pitied the child she’d been and what vestiges remained of her.
‘Who am I?’
‘It’s who you were, Rachel. You were Rachel Ballantyne, daughter of Seamus, loved and cherished until you were 10, when you died of diphtheria. You were summoned back to taunt him. You weren’t to blame for that.’
‘Did he love me?’
‘You were brought back to torment him. His torment was dreadful. I think that answers your question. May I ask one of you?’
There was a silence long enough for Napier to think he might be going mad. He smelled the gunpowder residue on his hands to remind himself he wasn’t. But her silence was drear, a soundless chasm of uncertainty.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Why did you help us yesterday?’
‘I did so because I could. Today I found he had given the second woman his protection, so I could assist you no more. He is surpassing sly and powerful. I would endeavour to show him my true self, mature after all this time. But I cannot.’
Your true self, Napier thought, dear Christ.
‘Why would you help us at all?’
That silence again. It was the cold, empty void between worlds. Rain hammered the earth. Grass swooned and capered in long tresses around where he sat in gusts of wind. He waited.
‘When you came here before, you were afraid. You patrolled the island at night. I watched you and you sensed my watching you. I stayed beyond your sight, but the watching was fearful hard for you to abide. So you sang to steel your courage. I learned the songs you sang. I plucked others out of your mind and sang them also.’
He’d not been aware of singing anything. He’d been listening a lot back then to Kate Rusby. His favourite album of hers had been Sleepless. It still was. She hadn’t surpassed it. He might have hummed The Wild Goose or Sweet Bride. He’d certainly been spooked on the island and right now, who in their right mind could fucking blame him?
‘I recalled The Recruited Collier from my own time. I favour Who Will Sing Me Lullabies. No one has ever sung me lullabies, Mr. Napier. Perchance no one ever will.’
Even in his terror, that truth seemed poignant to Paul Napier. He swallowed. He said, ‘I’ll sing you a lullaby, Rachel.’
‘There’s no comfort abides in his presence,’ she said. ‘A book is the source of his power. Much of it was written only to deter me. The spells written there bind me as bonds I cannot sunder. I am blind to its location, blind because of it to his. You must find and see the book is perished.’
‘Won’t he still be powerful?’
‘To your people, yes, he will still be strong, but not to me if the book perishes. I will put him to sleep forever. He will lie among the scorned and his sleep will never be restful. He will writhe to eternity in death. He will cavort in death, comfortless.’
Napier risked no further questions. A few minutes later, his pulse began to slow to something like its normal rate and his breathing became less ragged. He stopped shaking and knew that what had once been Rachel Ballantyne had departed him. She hadn’t said goodbye, but she could be forgiven for forgetting the niceties after almost two centuries of reluctant life spent mostly in bitter solitude.
She’d spared him because she�
�d enjoyed the songs he’d unknowingly taught her. She’d even become protective of him. That greeting in the stable at the Colony settlement hadn’t been a sarcastic threat. 10 year olds didn’t do sarcasm. She’d meant it. It was sincere. But there was no reason to rest on his laurels where Rachel Ballantyne was concerned. She had tasked them, hadn’t she? If they stayed on the island and they didn’t find and destroy the book she’d spoken about he thought her patience with them likely to wear thin rather rapidly.
The relevant section to Ruthie of Dennis Thorpe’s Island Life began at the start of the final chapter when his protagonist Sandy Banks, haunted beyond endurance and half-mad with terror in his isolation, begins to build his tribute to the dead trawler crew tormenting him. He’d dismembered his boat at the outset for materials, clever because it racked up the tension. If this plan of his didn’t work, he’d sacrificed to it his only means of escape from the island. And this act of remembrance and commemoration was pretty much his last throw of the dice.
He carried his blessed cargo of hope piece by piece, step by step to the plateau he’d discovered there in his exploration of the heights. Every wind-warped plank and reluctant nail, every spar and joist and bolted bonding of metal and wood had to be hand-hauled up there. This was his penance and the price he would pay for the calm and sanctity he sought. And for the authority too, for in his obeisance there was always at its heart, his iron will to govern this granite wilderness completely.
Painstakingly, his structure began to take physical form. It would be tribute and temple, shrine and mausoleum. His memorial to catastrophe would be stupendous in scale and unique in its isolation and would endure through the withering winters of this unforgiving place until time itself grew weary of the relentless passage of years.
He hammered and cranked and levered his mighty structure into three dimensions. He sweated and laboured at the fevered pace of someone wholly committed to creating something epically grand. He sang the shanties of his sea-faring youth as he did so; the old songs which matched in their melodies the rhythmic toil of hauling anchor or raising sail. In so doing he enjoyed his first moments of contentment and happiness he’d known since coming there. He did not know for how long these emotions would last, but took them as a sign of encouragement.
He sculpted and coaxed and shaped the great complication of his construction into physical actuality. He achieved his ambition to fashion something wonderful from the debris and careless discard available to him there; from the salvaged and wrecked, the broken and stranded and beach-strewn. And when he had finished he paused and it sang back to him. The wind on the heights shrilled and crooned through its wooden chinks and iron crevices in an elemental hymn to hope and human creativity.
He looked and was delighted with what he’d accomplished but knew it was not enough. He gathered stones. It was the work of days and it almost broke him, weary as he was, crawling for refuge nightly into the hollow at the base of his structure and sleeping until dawn stirred him from the dreamless sleep of the dead.
He placed a circle of stones at the base of what he’d built and built on them, entombing his construction entirely after a week of this work in a great grey cone of granite, making of it a private place, built to endure and defy the elements, a monument both awesome in scale and confidential in the secret it harboured, resembling now only some rare and wondrous eruption of geology.
He had built his tribute. He had guaranteed it would survive. He descended from the heights heavy of heart because Sandy Banks knew it was still not enough. The dead crew haunting him, their imperious skipper and querulous first-mate and sure-eyed steersman demanded even more. What more could he give, he wondered. And then at once, he knew.
From the cottage he’d built, he recovered the logs compiled faithfully during his own maritime days. He’d mastered the crafts he’d voyaged aboard and had entered their books with detail every day. They documented his life aboard those vessels. In that sense, scrupulous and personal, they were the very essence of his sea-faring existence.
He bound them together with twine and then wrapped and bound the whole in oilskin. He put this package carefully into a hessian sack he closed at the throat. And once more he scaled the heights back to the place of pilgrimage he’d founded and constructed and not quite finished; for this final act of fealty was its final blessing too.
He removed sufficient stones at the base to crawl into what he’d built and at its very centre, he laid down the sack containing what was, symbolically, the whole of his nautical life. He tightened the knot at its throat. He crawled back out and replaced the stones he’d removed, hammering at them with a loose stone he could grip in the fingers of his right hand until they were once again firmly in place.
Halfway down from the climb, he turned to look at what he’d accomplished, but by then it was obscured by the grey folds of the crag protecting it from the worst of the prevailing wind. He was none-the-less satisfied. He had completed his monument and paid his tribute and though magic was beyond his powers, he thought he had done enough to earn his security and peace and his promising future in a place now rendered safe by him and his insights and the precautions sensibly taken there.
Ruthie Gillespie didn’t drive. That didn’t mean she couldn’t. She thought three groups of people legitimately drove motor vehicles on Wight. They were its tradespeople, its emergency services and tourist families with young children. Everyone else could make do with the bus and when you were scenically minded, the train. To hire a car she’d need only a clean driver’s license and a credit card and she was in possession of both of those.
‘Couldn’t help yourself, could you,’ she said aloud, looking at her copy of Island Life, the cover curling with the way she’d bent back the pages on the journey to and from Lewes, re-reading it. The section she’d just read over wasn’t only a history lesson and a bit of biography, it wasn’t merely a clue either, it was practically a manifesto.
‘…magic was beyond his powers…’
That was true, in the sense that magic was beyond the powers of Sandy Banks, who while intuitive about the demands of the unrestful dead, did not actually mutter spells over bubbling cauldrons. It might have been true too of the author of the story when he’d written it. But he’d been working on that since then, during those furtive summers spent in County Clare. They’d been deadly and ambitious summers and magic had been their whole purpose.
She’d been right about Dennis Thorpe, who was Dennis Shanks and right too about his writerly vanity. He hadn’t been able to help himself and she knew now what to do about it, something she thought none of the people who’d gone to New Hope Island did. It was something that had to be done if they were to have a chance of escaping from there safely. She thought they’d die otherwise.
They’d die as surely as Nick McClain had. Not necessarily in the same manner, but just as emphatically. He might kill them as McClain’s Irish witness to the event had said he’d killed that traveller’s dog. He enjoyed killing and ritual killing bolstered his power and he believed New Hope a pace of potent magic.
There was no time to waste. She needed to get there.
It was ten o’clock on Sunday evening in East Sussex. She would bed down there at the White Hart after first arranging a hire car using the internet. She’d set off after an early breakfast, as soon as she’d paid her bill. She needed to sleep. She was in for a day’s driving tomorrow and she’d not worked out how she’d get to New Hope Island when she reached Scotland’s west coast. There was a ferry service from Ullapool to Stornoway and it was the season, thank God, so the ferries would be running and frequent.
Everything was weather dependent, but the busiest of the Western Isles was reachable so long as the sea was reasonably calm. And Stornoway had a bustling harbour and Ruthie could sail. She’d been sailing since her early childhood. She’d even done it in her teens, with the stipulation that her dinghy’s sails by that stage were dyed black…
But the Solent wasn’t the Atlantic
Ocean. She’d have to think of something. She’d be driving fast and anxiously. The speed wouldn’t cause the anxiety, Ruthie, who drove rarely, always drove fast. The anxiety would be over whether her journey was pointless because she’d be arriving too late to help the people in mortal danger at her intended destination.
She’d think of a way to get from the Stornoway to New Hope. She’d have to. That wasn’t necessarily dangerous, it was just difficult. The danger would confront her once she’d got there, but at least she’d get there knowing now what needed to be done.
Chapter Eighteen
It was after midnight by the time Paul Napier got back to the expedition compound. He was cold and shaken by his encounter with the other-worldly waif who’d once plucked folk songs from his mind. He was much less bothered than he’d thought he’d be by the fact he’d only that night shot a woman to death – a first for him. He’d been fond of his boss and rightly grateful to him and McIntyre’s was only the latest murder his victim had committed. Napier thought the world well rid of the woman who’d masqueraded as The Very Reverend Mabel Farrow.
Rachel Ballantyne said something to him before he left her, a parting thought, no more than a murmur he wasn’t even sure he was meant to catch. She might just have been thinking out loud when she said, ‘He has stirred this place, worried its memories as a bad dog will worry sheep. It is become a domain of ghosts, now.’
His journey back to the compound proved this. He thought the storm easing slightly. He caught scents on the wind. Tobacco was one and rum another. There was the musty odour clinging to old clothing of human sweat. At the edge of his vision he thought he caught glimpses twice of yellowy lantern light, hand swung, flickering, no more than a tallow glimmer behind lead-latticed glass.
He heard sudden laughter, snatches of song and a single, half-choked sob. None of the phantoms he thus sensed showed themselves, for which he was grateful. He was not confident the spectres of those who had lived and died in Seamus Ballantyne’s Kingdom of Belief would have weathered all that well. The echo down the centuries of their sea shanties and the whiff of their clay pipes and the sour scent of grimed flesh under threadbare garments was more than enough for him without the sight of them.
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