‘Only a theory,’ Ruthie said.
Lassiter said, ‘Poor Nick McClain was right about you, young woman. You’ve a real instinct for detection.’
‘Thank God you have,’ Edie said. ‘We’d all be dead without it.’ Edie’s eyes were tearful. She was mourning the two people she’d known as her uncle Paul and her auntie Lucy. Death was a shocking assault to the young. Ruthie was still young enough to appreciate that herself.
‘I wouldn’t have worked it out, if you hadn’t left me behind,’ she said. ‘We’ve Patsy to thank for that.’
She smiled at him and was dismayed to see that Patrick Lassiter showed no great delight in being alive. Dismayed, but not surprised. She understood why. They all did.
When they got to their boat, there was a message for them there. It had been spelled out, not very well, in pebbles pressed into the sand. It read; I meen you no harm Mr. Lazziter.
‘Why would she write that?’ Edie said, shivering.
Now, Patrick Lassiter was smiling; slightly, anyway, almost secretively. ‘It’s my invitation to come back and I’m going to take it,’ he said.
Phil Fortescue said, ‘Just like that, Patsy?’
‘It was what I was thinking about when Ruthie found me last night on the shore. I’m going to take a leave of absence and rebuild the cottage here. It’s a season of grief for me and solving old crimes won’t get me through it. I’ll build and cultivate and subsist here and hope doing all that will.’
Edie Chambers said, ‘Do you know any folk songs?’
Lassiter said, ‘Does Laura Marling count?’
‘Not really, no. I’d learn a few, if I were you, before coming back here.’
‘I’ll do the crash course, Edie,’ Lassiter said.
‘Promise me, Patsy,’ she said. ‘I haven’t got many of you left.’
‘I promise,’ he said.
Ruthie thought about Lassiter sensing the presence of his wife. Her hair and scent and the two words Alice had spoken to him. She hadn’t mentioned that episode to anyone and knew now that she never would. Not even to Phil, she wouldn’t, whom she’d determined to get to know much better after this. She looked at Lassiter and he looked back and nodded so slightly you wouldn’t notice if you weren’t looking for it in acknowledgement of their shared secret.
‘This is become a domain of ghosts, Patsy,’ Phil Fortescue said, putting his arm around his friend.
‘Ghosts don’t frighten me,’ Patrick Lassiter said back to him.
Chapter One
In his rare episodes of what he’d have dismissed as navel-gazing, Greg Cody thought of himself as an unimaginative man, hardly ever given to flights of fancy. He was clear-headed and pragmatic, orderly and precise. He was one of those men who didn’t so much submit to routine as impose it whenever disorder confronted him. His work was shore-bound, but in one of the clichés he was fondest of, he ran a tight ship. He thought this probably as often said of him as he said it of himself. It was the trait to which he owed his livelihood and the one that would shortly play a decisive part in killing him.
The project he was working on was less straightforward than really suited Greg. It was nowhere near as mundane as he would have liked it to be. It was something routinely described as visionary. To its investors, both public and private, it had been sold as a new age sanctuary, cultural hub and white-knuckle adventure park rolled into one. ‘Disneyland with a good university degree’, someone had apparently called it at one of the board’s meetings, and the story was that the more macho of the suits present had hammered their fists on the table they sat around in excited appreciation of the pitch.
Cody tended to see only the challenges. There was the physical isolation of the island. There was the unpredictability of the volatile weather in the Outer Hebrides. There was the fact that the old colony settlement at the island’s rough heart had recently been declared a World Heritage Site. That meant going there without official sanction was not only trespassing but potentially an act of vandalism. It was one more concern to factor in when they opened up and the paying guests finally began to arrive in their substantial numbers.
Right now, he thought that date, five full months hence on their schedule, almost impossibly remote. Most of the infrastructure was already in place. But January wasn’t June and the island had about it a persistent, desolate bleakness Cody thought of almost as a tangible affliction, especially during its long and sometimes pitch-black nights. New Hope was not welcoming in this hostile season. It was the last place anyone would consider hospitable. Its name in his mind had degenerated from misnomer to bad joke. Degree or no degree, Disneyland in its winter mood, it very definitely wasn’t.
Cody wasn’t someone generally given either to nervousness or to speculative thought but had discovered New Hope to be a place that provoked both in him. He felt alone there, which he was most of the time, but also constantly observed. This was an unhappy contradiction. Worse than unhappy, it was actually quite weird. It pulled and teased at the senses, sort of fraying them, making the island’s sights and sounds seem somehow threatening. It had compelled him after enduring it for a while to research the history of the place during a week’s home leave and doing that hadn’t provided him with any comfort at all.
The truth was that despite the natural obstacles of his character and will, the island had really got to him. It had done so to the point where was now counting the days until the boat came to take him off. He was looking forward to the banter of the pub, to the cheery bustle of a pizza house, to the solid, unambiguous comforts of the suburban home he shared with his wife. A growing part of him craved double-glazing and double-locks, central heating and a burglar alarm, the security light bought one Saturday from Homebase he’d positioned above their porch and most of all, the intimate touch of his wife’s sleeping body spooned against his own in the night.
At least, Cody was looking forward to those things when he had the time for reflection. He didn’t have that now, though. He’d awoken to a noise he’d heard in his sleep and couldn’t consciously remember, with a feeling only of empty dread and the suspicion that something or someone lurked and prowled beyond the canvas and steel compound he was quartered in. It was an interloper, he feared, a presence unwelcome there and surely up to no good. Bird watchers and nature-trailers didn’t steal ashore in the small hours. He came-to suddenly, gloomily sure an innocent intrusion hadn’t awoken him.
They were at the island’s southern extremity. They were sited on the slope above where New Hope’s only recent habitation stood. That was a crofter’s cottage, deserted now and though structurally sound, empty and therefore derelict.
No one else in the compound stirred.
He wasn’t its only resident. Somewhere on the island, three members of their six-strong security team would be patrolling. The other three, their day-shift, were asleep. Like the four-man maintenance crew, they were right now bunked cozily down in their huts. So he had seven other men onsite for company. But when he looked at his watch it was just after three in the morning. With no switching on of lights or rising hum of human voices, the complete lack of commotion told Cody he was the only person there at that moment awake and aware.
Oh, and of course if he was doing a proper New Hope inventory, there was Helena Davenport. She was their distinguished architect from the Glasgow-based practice of Davenport Associates. But she was comfy and secure in the residential complex they’d constructed at the other end of the island. She was domiciled in one of the suites they’d been too tastefully shrewd to describe as their first-class accommodation, though that’s what it most emphatically was. She was over there right now, her mission to make sure everything was going to run like clockwork for their most privileged guests when they opened up. At 3am though, five months pre-season, she’d be soundly asleep on the plush mattress of her suite’s king-size bed.
Greg Cody could yawn and scratch and bury his head under his pillow. Except that he couldn’t really do that, because he was
where the buck stopped. He was site manager, a fact reflected in his pay grade. He could bollock the security blokes when the time came for their negligence, but ultimately site integrity was his responsibility. And he was too unnerved anyway to try to go back to sleep. He knew he wouldn’t be able to do that.
He got out of his camp bed and went over to his single window. The sky was cloudy and the light very limited in his view of the velvet sea and inky sky spread endlessly above it. As his eyes adjusted, he could just make out the white-washed shape of the cottage, dirty and indistinct looking 500 metres away in the darkness. And as he looked he thought he saw movement outside it, something or someone stumbling or scurrying, just an indeterminate shape but animate, moving, uninvited there. A trespasser.
Greg didn’t know quite how to react. The feeling of dread he’d awoken with changed in him, morphing into indignation at the suspicion that someone was squatting on the island, maybe hoping to pilfer their supplies or steal plant or take materials to sell on as scrap metal. He didn’t know whether fishermen were particularly light-fingered, but he knew that the fishing quotas made their living harder these days than it had ever been for their fathers and grandfathers. And he knew that on a calm night, this part of New Hope’s coastline was easily approached clandestinely by boat. There were no reefs. There was no heavy surf.
He quickly got dressed. He had a big Maglite torch of the sort that was used by the police where Maglites were made, in America, and often doubled as a club. He hefted it and took it with him, but he didn’t switch it on because he didn’t want its powerful beam to give his intruder sufficient warning to be able to bolt. He thought he knew the island’s topography well enough to catch anyone blundering away from him blindly and he kept pretty fit. But he didn’t want to work any harder on his own time than he needed to.
He was confident of his physicality, his fighting prowess, should any confrontation now occur. Tasty, had been the word used about him in his younger, single, more tempestuous days. He’d had then what the jargon now defined as anger issues. He’d always been a big lad for his age and he’d needed to let off steam and he’d done it at the dojo; grappling and punching and kicking his way through years of judo and jujitsu and full-contact karate. Mixed martial-arts, they called it nowadays. The terminology didn’t matter much and he wasn’t itching for a scrap. Still, he thought, it was nice to have all that stuff in the tank. Push might yet come to shove. And it was reassuring to heft the weight of the Maglite he’d armed himself with.
There was no sound coming from his destination and the cottage as he got nearer to it was not only silent, but entirely still. His own footsteps were quiet, he was sure of the ground, but it was impossible to be completely noiseless on loose shale and then the scatters of shingle flung there by the waves of the island’s frequent violent winter storms.
The entrance to the cottage, its single door, faced the sea. He shivered. The wind was a stinging, briny assault this close to the water. It pricked at the naked skin of his face. He thought about the man who’d rebuilt the cottage, if the story was true a senior Metropolitan Police officer on some sort of sabbatical. Apparently he’d stuck it out there for six months.
Cody reckoned that was one copper with steel nerves, iron balls and even less imagination than he claimed to possess. The story ran that the Met Commander had been recovering from the grief inflicted by his wife’s death. She must have been a very special woman, Cody thought, not for the first time. The cottage grew larger and more detailed with his approach, though no less still or silent, his vigilant eyes and ears alert to any sound at all beyond the expected.
He stopped. He could hear something unexpected, suddenly. He could hear something curious. It was a coarse and rhythmic sound and it rattled like the bellows-wheeze of laboured breathing. Because he’d stopped, the sound of his approach had stopped and then the breathing noise stopped too, as if in response to his own halted progress. Greg Cody didn’t like that. It suggested a degree of cunning and it hinted at a trap. He listened, strained listening, concentrated, fully alert now and unsurprisingly tense. He raised the torch in his right hand and felt it tremble slightly, slick in a palm sweating despite the cold as he switched it on.
The beam was powerful and it washed the cottage door and doorframe in a white circle of light and Cody thought he heard a scuttling sound from within, as though startled and cowering. This emboldened him. Whatever skulked hiding inside that one-room shelter was more scared than scary, this new sound told him. His rigid muscles relaxed and he moved forward. He was at the cottage entrance in four or five determined strides and booted open its wooden door with a juddering crash. He played the torch on the building’s interior. The blackness before him resolved into something crouched stilly against the far wall and he dropped the torch with a metallic clatter onto the stone-flagged floor and screamed.
The scream was loud but swiftly stifled. In spite of its size, the thing confronting Greg Cody was inhumanly quick to pounce.
Felix Baxter gathered himself before punching the number into his phone. You didn’t cold-call a Metropolitan Police Commander without due consideration. It was 9am on Saturday, six hours since his people on New Hope had been awoken by a scream and discovered that their site-manager had disappeared.
Or so they said.
It was a worry. Five months before its official opening, his New Hope Experience didn’t need any bad publicity or damaging speculation or raking up of a history that could be picaresque and intriguing or brutal and terrifying, depending entirely on one’s perspective concerning the place.
The man to whom he was about to speak was arguably the world authority on New Hope Island. Commander Patrick Lassiter had been on the expedition seven years ago to try to discover what had happened to the island’s original colony, the 140 settlers who vanished without trace from there in the first half of the 19th century. Then 18 months or so ago, for reasons that were still obscure, he’d apparently felt obliged to go back there. That episode had been followed by an island sabbatical of six months. Lassiter had spent a season of grief restoring the cottage ruin built there in the 1930s by the celebrated bohemian and sometimes crofter, David Shanks.
He’d departed the island before the ground had been broken on the complex site at the heart of Baxter’s New Hope Experience. He hadn’t witnessed a minute of their inspired industry since. But if anyone had a handle on the history and mystery of the place, it was Lassiter.
‘Sorry to call you so early and at the weekend, Commander,’ Baxter said, after introducing himself. ‘I’m-’
‘I know who and what you are, Mr. Baxter. And I know too about your lost man. Western Islands Area Command called me an hour ago to inform me of Greg Cody’s disappearance and to discuss generally the island’s inherent hazards.’
‘A disorientating sea fret, the wash from a supertanker?’
‘That kind of thing.’
‘I’m speculating on foul play,’ Baxter said. ‘He didn’t know it, but Greg Cody’s nickname among the crew was Captain Sensible. Pardon my French, but to a man they thought him a pompous prick.’
‘You didn’t think to replace someone so unpopular?’
‘It’s a balancing act, morale versus efficiencies. He’s always been well organized and conscientious. He’s always been too good to lose.’
‘You seem to have lost him now.’
‘Unless he’s not been lost but actually deliberately dispensed with.’
‘The mood can turn mutinous among men working in close confinement in an isolated place,’ Lassiter said. ‘The odd fistfight wouldn’t be a surprise. Anyone can snap. But those Scottish coppers are shrewd and thorough and violent crime is messy. I’m told Cody was a tough bloke on his own account and none of his crew has a notable criminal profile or so much as an incriminating bruise.’
‘Using the past tense about him sounds a bit ominous.’
‘It sounds pragmatic to me.’
‘The other alternatives are an acc
ident or suicide.’
‘You’re entirely free to speculate, Mr. Baxter.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘The island’s got form.’
‘You think it suspicious?’
‘The weather was benign, Mr. Baxter. It must have been for the radio transmitter to function when your people there called it in and for Area Command to get men on the island so quickly afterwards. I don’t think Captain Sensible was swept out to sea in a storm when there wasn’t a storm to do the sweeping.’
So Cody’s disappearance was a mystery. Felix Baxter didn’t mind historical mysteries. They helped endow a place with character and atmosphere. They were a positive because they hinted at cultural pedigree and thus could actually become a selling point. Properly manipulated they drew the punters. But this was a mystery intruding rudely into the present and Baxter wasn’t at all partial to those.
He asked Lassiter outright, ‘Do you think the island dangerous?’
Lassiter hesitated before replying. Then he said, ‘It’s an inherently dangerous place. But I was left alone there.’
I was left alone there.
‘You haven’t asked me how I got your private number, Commander.’
‘You’re the engine driving the New Hope Experience. The Experience plans to bring a lot of money and prestige to the Hebrides. Consequently you’re the blue-eyed boy among some serious Scots politicians unscrupulous enough to lean on the police there to get that kind of information.’
‘I don’t have a Scots politician in my pocket.’
‘No, Mr. Baxter, your suits are far too well cut to accommodate the bulge.’
‘You don’t think we’ll find Cody?’
The Colony Trilogy Page 51