There was a pause between them and then they both laughed, a brief, blessed break in the pervading mood of bleakness. The laughter worked like a shot of something strong on Fortescue. It braced and encouraged him.
‘There’s food down here,’ he said.
‘It’s not ours.’
‘I’d say its owner’s badly overdrawn at the bank of hospitality. He owes us. Plus we’ve no alternative. Come on.’
There were savoury biscuits and hard cheese and tins of corned beef and chorizo kept fresh by blister packs. There were cartons of juice and there were apples and pears and bars of chocolate and they ate their fill before hearing the returning occupant of the space they’d invaded clacking down the stone steps on what sounded like the heavy leather soles of nail-studded boots.
To Fortescue, he appeared more costumed, than dressed. His boots looked like the sort that Mallory and Irvine might have worn to attempt to scale Everest. Above them his wool stockings disappeared into corduroy britches. He had on a Fair Isle sweater and over that, a tweed jacket with leather patches sewn onto the elbows and the austere precaution too of leather cuffs. He had closed the trapdoor after him and lit a hurricane lamp with a struck match and his hair had a brilliantine shimmer in the lamplight and a pipe was clenched between his tobacco discoloured teeth.
Fortescue felt curiously relaxed and unafraid. He thought vaguely that he owed that to having recently eaten and drunk, but seemed only capable of vague thought, as though nothing now would really clarify in a mind usually sharp. He glanced at his step-daughter and saw no trepidation on her face. That was a bad rather than a good thing because to him, Edie looked sedated, drugged as he knew he’d been and about to lapse at best into unconsciousness.
‘A Mickey Finn, we used to call it,’ the man standing before them with the lamp said, around his pipe stem. ‘My late and unlamented grandson was good enough to provision the island with a potent supply of the stuff. Manufactured in a laboratory, from scratch apparently, which has to make one wonder what the boffins might think of next.’
His voice sounded extraordinary, Fortescue was able to think, under the torpor thickening rapidly into slumber in his veins. It was a voice you only heard on archive broadcasts made by announcers wearing black-tie on the pre-war BBC. Had Dennis Shanks been possessed? Was this the spirit of his dead ancestor David in a shape merely borrowed? It was a question too far for Fortescue’s drug-numbed mind, but the man puffing sourly on the pipe in front of them looked a lot older than 34.
He heard himself say, ‘What are you going to do with us?’
‘The answer to that should be obvious by now, chum. The only really valid question is when.’
Sleep fell on Phil Fortescue as blackly as the fire curtain descending on a stage.
It took Lassiter a moment to orient himself when he rounded the point and reached the spot where the Shanks cottage should have come into view. He’d seen it so often – first on cine-film, then in archive photos and finally six years ago in life – that the familiar vista that usually framed it seemed surreally unfinished in its absence.
The finality of the moment hit him then and the grief so overwhelmed him that he sank to the sand on strength-less knees and wept, keening, his hands gathering and releasing grains in spasms, quite unable to bear the burden of his loss, unmanned by it, repeating his dead wife’s name over and over, as though the agony of his lamentation could persuade the fates to somehow hand her back.
Eventually, thigh-deep in brine from the incoming tide, he found from somewhere the fortitude to get back up. He did so cursing himself. If they hadn’t come here, she wouldn’t have died. Only their arrival on the island had marked her for death and that had been his fault, hadn’t it? If he hadn’t returned to the antiques arcade that second time for the cuff-links. If he hadn’t forced her to see the hand David Shanks had played in the death of their original owner. If he hadn’t thus obliged her to determine destiny was impelling her back to New Hope. He’d been the architect and orchestrator of her death. He was as culpable, he thought, as if he’d killed her with his own hands.
There was nothing left of the cottage except a rectangular scar where the masonry had rested on the ground. But there was something, a breeze-stirred flap and flutter and a jewelled sparkle his raw eyes could discern no pattern to, further back from the cottage’s rear, where the land began its incline.
The note had been left at the base of a salt-stunted bush. Two flat pint bottles of whisky anchored it on the earth. The bottle labels were ragged and faded with age, Lassiter saw, as need clawed thirstily at his guts and his mouth filled expectantly with saliva. He pulled the note free. It was hand-written and the writer had used a fountain pen. The ink was black and the calligraphy neat and precise. He read the note.
Tragic day, old boy and I can offer only my deepest condolences for a loss I expect you will find unsupportable. There’s little I can say and I’ve always believed that actions speak louder anyway than words.
I won’t pretend there’s any comfort to be had. But the island once distilled its own potent brand of anaesthetic. This is the 200 year old, or near enough, peaty and mellow and with a promise it can guarantee to at least relieve pain that must seem frankly unendurable.
Have a drink, Patrick. Indeed, help yourself to several. Both bottles are yours with my compliments. No one needs or deserves a drop of the hard stuff more than you do in your current, sad predicament.
Sincerely,
David Shanks
The whisky bottles had cork stoppers. Lassiter picked up a bottle and hefted it and sniffed back tears and snot. He pried out the cork with his teeth, the aroma of the old whisky a bouquet sweeter than he thought he’d ever before scented flowering under his nostrils. He felt gratitude for the oblivion about to be delivered him. That gratitude reproached him at the same time, because he knew to whom he felt it owed. He raised the neck of the bottle to his lips and closed his eyes.
Chapter Twenty
Ruthie Gillespie finally reached Stornoway Harbour at 8pm on Monday evening knowing exactly what it was she was looking for. The harbour was busy with night fishermen preparing their trawlers for what they no doubt hoped would be a net-bulging, lucrative overnight catch. Ruthie was looking for the master of a craft sufficiently down on their luck to give her a ride instead to New Hope Island for the fee she could afford to pay them, which wasn’t a huge amount.
The first two skippers she approached turned her down flat. The third wasted 15 precious minutes of her time chewing over her proposal before spitting it out onto the quayside. He suggested a date, as she walked away from him. She suggested in her own backdraft something he could do instead with a rolling donut. They had deep-fried Mars Bars in Scotland. They were sure to have donuts too.
The fourth trawler-man she approached looked no more than 17 or 18 years old and the hull of his boat appeared held together by applications of paint and optimism smeared thickly over years of attrition and rust. He was perfect for her. He ticked all the boxes.
‘You want to go where?’
‘To New Hope Island, please.’
‘New Hope is it, just like that?’
‘I’m prepared to pay you two-hundred-and-fifty quid, for a one way ticket. The alternative is going out there tonight and maybe catching fuck-all. Think about it.’
He was thinking about it. He was red-haired and freckly and looked like the one the boy-band dispensed with quietly when Louis Walsh got ruthless with them as their daydreams hardened into a contract. He said, ‘What’s that you’re carrying?’
‘It’s an inflatable kayak and the pump to blow it up with. They come in a kit, with a paddle. Get me five hundred metres off-shore and the cash is yours.’
‘It isn’t enough.’
‘It’s more than you’d earn otherwise tonight.’
‘I swore I’d never go within a mile of New Hope. My dad made me. His dad had done the same to him. The island’s cursed. I’ll not risk my life for a couple of
hundred pounds.’
‘Ooh,’ she said, ‘not exactly Braveheart.’
‘William Wallace wasn’t a trawler-man.’
‘You get where I’m coming from.’
‘Plus, he ended up hung, drawn and quartered.’
‘Don’t make me beg.’
‘I swore an oath.’
‘Fuck you,’ she said, ‘coward.’ She hitched the heavy burden of the rubber kayak she was carrying, thinking that was a terrible thing to say. She was tired and she was stressed. No excuse.
‘I’ll do it for the watch,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I’ll do it for the Rolex on your wrist. Otherwise, lady, no-go.’
Ruthie blew out a breath. She hesitated for about two seconds. The watch was the most valuable thing she owned. It was cogs and springs and a dial, intricately assembled, lovingly worn. It wasn’t human lives. Even at a second or two, she felt ashamed about her delay in striking their deal. She unclasped it and held it out to him. He grinned.
‘Arsehole,’ she said. She popped gum into her mouth.
The grin widened.
‘How soon can we be there?’
‘If this calm holds, you’ll put off in not more than an hour.’
The crossing was uneventful. Ruthie checked her kit. It was back to her cadet days at her Royal Russell boarding school on that score and she was grateful for the mental discipline of ingrained martial habit. She’d been good on the cadet force. She’d scored high on the endurance tests, excelled at the orienteering and she’d been an excellent shot. It was ancient history, but it was her personal ancient history and she was only 33. A bit to her own surprise, she’d got back into the groove of it pretty easily.
She became concerned, once they lost sight of land completely. The trawler, which was really only a smack, lay low in the water even with an empty hold. Her engine sounded like it would chug along for ever if only out of force of habit, but her bilge pump toiled in a way that suggested the vessel was no stranger to leakage below the waterline. Ruthie couldn’t help thinking of Nick McClain and the substantial and seaworthy craft he’d been aboard and the fact that it had been lost abruptly and with all hands.
Her captain’s name was Adam Cox. He liked Coldplay and Elbow, he told her, which made him older than he looked, something he confessed to by admitting he was actually a baby-faced 28. He was an excellent steersman and they made the time he’d said they would without anything alarming occurring. New Hope came into sight. She saw what looked to her inexperienced eye like an old dock or landing stage, but Cox ignored it. He kept chugging and wallowing on with the dark bulk of the island elongating to their left.
‘I’ll put you off 500 metres off the southern shore, where your fixed landmark will be the crofter’s cottage, what’s left of it. That’s the best place to make landfall, the calmest with regard to surf and there’re no reefs or onshore currents there. It’s further, in respect of my diesel, but it’s the safest spot. I don’t want your drowning on my conscience.’
‘You’re all heart, Adam,’ she said, regretting her cheap earlier Braveheart jibe, thinking I don’t want your drowning on my conscience either.
‘Here,’ he said, as she inflated the kayak she’d bought. He was dangling her wristwatch in front of her on the deck of his boat. The bracelet and oyster case caught and glimmered in the late dusk.
‘What’s this?’
‘Don’t believe everything you read about the Scots,’ he said.
‘Can I at least pay you for your fuel?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘You’ll take nothing?’
‘Why’re you going there?’
‘Some friends of mine there need help.’
‘They would. The place is cursed. They were fools going, your friends.’
She shrugged. She was frightened now she was actually about to set foot on New Hope.
‘You can change your mind,’ he said. ‘I can take you back.’
‘I’m here now,’ she said. ‘And I want to pay you.’
‘Forty pounds for the cost of the fuel,’ he said. ‘I’d feel criminal taking more and taking the watch would have brought me terrible luck.’
Her money was rolled into a rubber band in the pocket of the waterproof jacket she’d bought outside Lancaster. She peeled off the notes.
‘God speed you, Ruthie Gillespie.’
‘I hope you catch a whole hold-full of fish,’ she said, ‘and Adam?’
‘Ruthie?’
‘You’re a lot braver than bloody Mel Gibson.’
She lowered her inflated kayak into the water. The sea drubbed at its flimsy rubber sides. She inhaled a breath and steadied and climbed aboard it and paddled shoreward. She couldn’t see the crofter’s cottage but didn’t need any landmark aids to navigation. The bulk of the island lay before her with small waves breaking whitely on the beach as she neared its shore.
Something bad happened, then. Something substantial bumped against the side of her craft, a side she was reluctant to call a hull because she possessed an islander’s fastidiousness concerning the sea and a hull was generally composed of more than rubber and air and hope. The thing grated and wobbled and clung and in clear starlight, Ruthie looked at it.
It was a bloated, bobbing human corpse. It was headless and one arm was missing from it. Small fish surrounded these deficiencies like the fringes on a buckskin jacket. Except that when you studied them they dimpled and squirmed with appetite. She swallowed bile. She pushed the corpse away with a paddle-blade hoping it wasn’t one of the people she’d gone there to help. On balance, it probably was.
She’d put her wristwatch into a pocket and didn’t know the time. She thought it must be after dusk, but realised that it wasn’t going to go fully dark this far north and this late in June. Rather than becoming night, the evening had instead become monochromatic, as though the colour had been bleached out of all of the physical features she registered.
New Hope was now a black and white world, like a movie watched on an old television set. Probably something sinister from Hammer studios, she thought, noticing a figure seated and still on a plateau of flat terrain a hundred metres inland from where she’d beached.
There was no avoiding whoever it was. She was unarmed. She picked a hefty pebble out of the shingle hauling her kayak beyond the reach of the waves, remembering the success she’d enjoyed with the paperweight when clunking it against Andrea Thorpe’s temple. Mad to think that had been only a little over 24 hours ago. If needs be she’d do the same again. She’d come there with a single objective and was intent on fulfilling it.
It was Patrick Lassiter. He was seated on a rock with the gnarled trunk of a dwarf bush at his back. By his feet were two old-fashioned liquor bottles. They were both full of what looked in the absence of light to Ruthie’s eyes like pee. She guessed it was actually whisky. He looked at her without apparent surprise. He was clutching a note. His eyes were raw and bloodshot, but he looked sober. He reached up and handed her the note.
Ruthie read it. Then she reached down and hauled Lassiter to his feet and hugged him hard. He hugged her back, sobbing. She held him until his body had stopped shaking, grateful when it did because she didn’t think they had much time.
‘Weren’t you tempted?’
‘Paul Napier’s dead. So is Lucy Church. Alex McIntyre is dead. Paul’s wraith said this was becoming a domain of ghosts.’
‘I’m guessing your ghost was Alice.’
‘I didn’t see her. I smelled her perfume and felt the flicker of her hair on my face, though, just as I was about to take a drink. And I heard her. She said two words to me.’
Ruthie pondered this. Don’t do it was two words and a contraction. It was three words to most people. So was, I love you. ‘Was one of them Patsy?’
That made him smile. He met her eyes. He said, ‘She only ever called me Patrick. That was the second word. The first one was, ‘Please’.’
‘I never met Paul Napier
,’ Ruthie said. ‘I’m assuming his wraith was Rachel Ballantyne.’
‘She told him there’s a book we need to find. It’s too late for that now.’
‘It’s not too late and I know where to find it,’ Ruthie said. ‘I’m going to do that now and you’re going to help me.’
His breath hitched raggedly in his chest, he said, ‘I’m good for nothing, Ruthie.’
‘Alice never believed that. I don’t believe it, either.’ She swallowed and closed her eyes and felt her hands clench into fists. ‘Are Phil Fortescue and Edie Chambers dead?’
‘I don’t know.’
Ruthie opened her eyes again. Relief was premature, but she felt it anyway. She said, ‘Even if it’s too late for them, I’m still going to do this. You’ve got a minute to compose yourself while I deflate and hide my boat. Then if I have to drag you, you’re coming with me.’
Fortescue felt the tick of Ballantyne’s watch beating in his jeans pocket strongly against his thigh. It was a reminder of his past courage and fortitude. He thought the circumstances made the first of those qualities redundant now. He thought he’d need the second of them, though. Shanks believed his occult power gained greatly from sacrifice. The more good his victim embodied, the greater the consequent gain. Edie Chambers hadn’t lived long enough for corruption or moral compromise. So her killing would very likely be a priority.
He’d bound them while they slept. The handcuffs looked to Fortescue like police issue. They had that strength and solidity. They weren’t of the joke fetish variety available at party shops for stag weekends. Their job was restraint and he thought Dennis Thorpe, who was Dennis Shanks, had probably sourced them as part of the thorough and meticulous planning he’d done prior to the luring to New Hope of his island retreat victims.
It seemed likely he’d been there before their arrival as a group. He’d stored his equipment and he’d plotted his moves and among that equipment had been the nylon rope with which, like the still-sleeping Edie, Phil Fortescue had awoken bound expertly at the ankles.
What mystified Fortescue, was that the man sitting studying him in that cellar full of ancient whisky, wasn’t Dennis Shanks. He bore a strong facial resemblance to the writer, but was a shorter, slighter, altogether more sinewy man. He used the idiom when he spoke of a previous era. There was something anachronistic about his clothing – men still dressed like that in shooting parties slaughtering game birds with lead-shot – but again, it was all of a period and the period wasn’t now.
The Colony Trilogy Page 49