‘No.’
‘The thing is, I really don’t like loose ends.’
‘Which is why you’d like foul play and an arrest and prosecution. You’d settle fort suicide, which is a bit sombre but neatly emphatic. A fatal accident suggests the place might be prone to them, which isn’t ideal. But even that’s better than the enigma you’ve got.’
‘Thanks for your time, Commander. It’s genuinely appreciated.’
‘I’m sure.’
Thanks for nothing, Baxter thought.
Ruthie Gillespie and Phil Fortescue very rarely talked about New Hope. He didn’t dwell on the subject, she supposed, because he didn’t want grief to become the defining characteristic of his ongoing existence. She didn’t mention it partly through sensitivity to that but mostly because she was quite a modest person. The idea of being a decisive woman of action, which she’d had to be when she’d gone to the island, seemed 18 months on absurd to her. And she didn’t want to be Phil’s saviour, she wanted to be his equal and partner in the ongoing romance they were sharing.
But the island was so much in the news, it was becoming hard to ignore. And there were persistent hazards there, or there were according to Patrick Lassiter, a man who’d spent a season of despair and recuperation from his own loss on New Hope and had come away from the place genuinely afraid for anyone who might follow in his bereft and lonely footsteps. Patsy had been vague about the nature of those hazards. At least, he had whenever he’d mentioned the place to Ruthie since his return from there.
Now Patsy Lassiter had called Phil. He’d done so that morning, quite early for a Saturday. And Phil was refusing to disclose any detail about the call. This was uncharacteristic in so open a man and was provoking some tension between them. They only had their weekends together and Ruthie thought any part of the weekend spent unhappy a waste of their valuable shared time.
‘You’ll tell me eventually,’ she said.
‘Curiosity killed the cat,’ he said.
‘They had their big hit when I was four, so they don’t actually mean much to me.’
He smiled. He said, ‘I was fourteen. I thought they were very cool. I wanted a beret like their singer wore but it would have been suicide in my part of Liverpool back in 1987.’
Ruthie smiled back, despite herself. They were at her cottage in Ventnor and it was chilly and raining. She thought that to a man with a flat in London, Wight must seem a bleak place in the cold and damp so far out of season. That said, Wight held a lot more allure than New Hope ever had. She’d lit her wood burner. It was a recent, extravagant acquisition. She’d told herself the money she’d save quitting smoking would pay for it. That was still, sadly, a theoretical bit of economic reasoning.
‘Patsy Lassiter calls you on a Saturday morning. He doesn’t do that to ask for help with a crossword clue, or for fashion advice or to share a recipe. Whatever he says, it has you hopping off into the garden to carry on the conversation.’
‘I don’t hop.’
‘Despite the cold and the rain, for privacy, so the woman whose guest you are, whose bed you’re sharing, can’t eavesdrop. That’s charming, Phil.’
‘Sarcasm doesn’t suit you.’
‘Stop provoking it then. Tell me what Patsy wanted.’
Fortescue took a breath. He stared at the flames flickering orange through the glass of the wood burner. Ruthie generally thought the dimensions of her home well proportioned. Conflict though made it feel suddenly cramped. She thought that perhaps she wouldn’t persist with this. She was naturally curious, but people were entitled to a bit of confidentiality, even when you were intimate with them. It was an aspect of the trust you shared. Or at least it was supposed to be.
Fortescue said, ‘Patsy took a call from Felix Baxter early this morning.’
‘The New Age mastermind who dreamed up the New Hope Island Experience?’
‘I think he’s more entrepreneur than visionary, Ruthie. The language around the project is pretty airy-fairy, but the motive is profit, pure and simple.’
‘Why’d he call Patsy?’
‘One of his people has gone missing there.’
‘Patsy Lassiter’s hardly in the frame for that. He’s been back living in Maida Vale for months.’
‘The missing man’s the site manager,’ Fortescue said. ‘There’s only a skeleton crew on the island because most of the infrastructure’s ready, apparently. They open on May 1 and they’re fully booked for the entire season until the end of September.’
‘Shame we won’t be going,’ Ruthie said.
‘Sarcasm really doesn’t suit you.’
She wanted a cigarette. She wanted a drink. She looked at her watch. It was much too early, with Phil there, even for white wine. Phil discriminated against white wine on the grounds that it contained alcohol. You had to tolerate peoples’ eccentricities, if you loved them, so Ruthie did, but not always happily.
‘There were seven other people present at their compound when a bloke named Greg Cody vanished. In the small hours, they were awoken by a scream. They found Cody’s camp bed empty and a Maglite torch inside the crofter’s cottage. Their compound’s at the southern apex of the island, so close to the cottage. Cody’s bed was still warm but there was no trace of him.’
‘I don’t understand what this has to do with Patsy,’ Ruthie said.
Fortescue said, ‘Patsy was still on the island until a fortnight before the Baxter project began. Of anyone living, he’s the authority on the place. Western Isles Area Police Command were told about the disappearance straight away and so were the coastguard. Baxter wanted to know, based on his experience of New Hope, whether Patsy could float any theories.’
‘Did he?’
Fortescue bit his lip. He said, ‘Look, Ruthie, I wouldn’t normally dream of saying this, because it’s only eleven o’clock, and you’ve lit that fire and all, but I think we should take this to the pub.’
‘Only if you absolutely insist,’ she said.
They weren’t the only people in the Spyglass Inn, which meant that they weren’t the first there either. This could have worked on Ruthie as an argument for making up for lost time. She thought that the civilized world would have been a good fit for her inclinations drink-wise in the golden period between the mid-1960s, when women were first lured respectably into pubs, up to the wine-bar boom of the early 1980s, after which matters started becoming generally a bit more health-conscious. Those carefree days and their breezy values weren’t returning anytime soon. And they’d played out before her birth. She sipped demurely at a small glass of house white slightly nostalgic for a time she’d never known.
‘Why did Patsy call you?’
Phil didn’t answer her directly. He said, ‘Most people who think about the mystery at all still think the New Hope Island vanishing the world’s most spectacular incident of alien abduction. They think the colony founded by Seamus Ballantyne in the 1820s whisked off into space a decade later.’
‘But the expedition you and Patsy were part of disproved that.’
‘The chronology wasn’t quite that clear cut. Neither were the personnel. I wasn’t even part of the original expedition. I’ve been reluctant to discuss it since in any detail, even with you. What’s significant is that when Ballantyne was still master of the slave ship Andromeda, well before his epiphany and religious calling, he was doubly cursed.’
‘By a witch doctor manacled in his slave hold,’ Ruthie said, ‘a powerful sorcerer who said Ballantyne’s dead daughter would come back to haunt him and a monster would eventually devour him. And all of this was written up in a journal describing the voyage. The ship’s physician Thomas Horan wrote it in secret and you rediscovered it and you went to the island and destroyed the monster there.’
‘Did I?’
‘You thought you had. Seven years ago.’
‘Getting on for eight.’
‘And now you’re not so sure?’
‘It’s all so bloody vague. You’d think you’d
remember something that horrific in better detail.’
Ruthie thought just the opposite true. She thought what had happened to Phil’s memory of that event no more than a defence mechanism for a mind seeking escape from something too horrific to dwell upon. ‘I’ll get us another drink,’ she said.
There was no queue at the bar. The other people in the pub were pensioners, people with their lives pretty much behind them. Or at least with the active part of it, their ambitions and achievements, firmly anchored in their past. Their futures were a plodding and predictable matter of routine.
Thinking this made her think of the funding campaign with which Felix Baxter had swamped the internet trying to sell the New Hope Experience to the world when it was still at the concept stage. Failure of nerve is a dream’s greatest obstacle to becoming reality. Achievement is just an ambition in three dimensions. Fulfilment is only ever a dare away from your grasp; plus many other meaningless platitudes and bits and pieces of pun and motto and alliterative nonsense. It had worked, though. It had done the trick in spectacular style. He’d raised his investment capital and steamed ahead with his project.
She sat back down at their table.
‘Cheers,’ Phil said, raising his fresh pint of Guinness. He’d made short and thirsty work of his first, which was uncharacteristic. It was out of character for him to drink at all in the daytime.
Ruthie said, ‘So here’s our scenario. You didn’t destroy that thing that devoured people on New Hope. You just discouraged it for a few years. It’s licked its wounds and regained its appetite and it’s back with a vengeance.’
‘I’m not relishing this idea for a sequel,’ Phil said.
‘It consumes a couple more unfortunate night-watchmen or maintenance staff, maybe a plumber or an electrician and the Western Isles police close the whole thing down. They declare the island too hazardous for human habitation and quarantine the whole God-forsaken rock and Baxter’s investors take a hit on what was always a reckless gamble.’
‘Why always reckless?’
‘Take your pick,’ Ruthie said. ‘There’s the unpredictable weather, the island’s remoteness, its sinister reputation, its alarming mortality rate and the fact that there’s a demonic spirit there in the guise of a dead child. Is that list not long enough to make the New Hope Experience just a tiny bit foolhardy?’
‘There might be a relatively innocent explanation for Cody’s disappearance,’ Fortescue said.
‘And you might be clutching at straws in saying so,’ Ruthie said. ‘You think that thing is back, that it never really went away. It’s why you’re halfway through your second pint at 12.30 in the afternoon.’
‘It’s the weekend,’ he said, with a wink.
‘You’re really worried, aren’t you?’
He was silent, staring at his glass. Then he raised his eyes to meet hers. He said, ‘That creature wasn’t just malevolent and hungry. It was intelligent and sly. Above all, Ruthie, it was real. It took the lives of half the people who went on the expedition. Patsy Lassiter will back me up on that.’
‘Did he see it?’
‘He was there when the expedition’s priest went into the colony settlement’s windowless church to confront it. He was there when Monseigneur Degrelle screamed and when I went in after him. He was there when I came back out again afterwards.’
‘But he didn’t actually see it.’
‘I think it might wait. Imagine four or five hundred people on the island in June or July and one of those storms you get there setting in. Imagine them, just families, the island isolated by weather for four or five days, or a week.’
‘You think this is really possible.’
‘Patsy only settled on New Hope to recover from losing his wife. He told me this morning that he became aware of being watched there.’
‘By Rachel Ballantyne,’ Ruthie said, ‘by Seamus Ballantyne’s daughter who died at 10 of diphtheria. That crofter, David Shanks, caught her on cine film in the 1930s. Patsy Lassiter sourced the film in the run up to the expedition. And 18 months ago, you saw her in the flesh.’
‘It didn’t much resemble flesh. Anyway Patsy didn’t think it was Rachel doing the watching when he was rebuilding the Shanks cottage. His watcher wasn’t just curious. It was intrigued, hostile and there was something else.’
‘What was the something else?’
‘He felt as though he was being studied. He thought he was being learned from. He came away from there with the conviction that he was only tolerated because of that. It was the only reason he was left alive.’
‘I suppose from Patsy’s perspective, being watched is better than being devoured.’
‘No argument there.’
‘It’s a long lifespan, though, almost 200 years.’
‘I don’t blame you for being skeptical.’
‘I’ve been to New Hope, Phil. You know I have. You were there. So you know I’m not that skeptical. What are you going to do?’
‘When I first read Horan’s journal, my instinct was to find a professor of comparative religions or an anthropologist familiar with the pagan belief system of the slave-sorcerer’s tribe. There wasn’t time for that then. But I’d like to know what it actually is and the claims made for it mythologically. I’d like to see a picture of one, if such a thing has ever been drawn or painted.’
‘More likely carved,’ Ruthie said, ‘if it’s African and tribal. You told me he gave it a name, that Horan wrote it down.’
‘He did. He called it, The Being that Hungers in the Darkness.’
Ruthie shivered. She sipped wine. She said, ‘Felix Baxter always peddles the theory that aliens abducted Seamus Ballantyne’s community.’
‘Well he would, wouldn’t he,’ Fortescue said.
Chapter Two
The money had come from a rich assortment of sources because the New Hope Experience appealed on so many different and rewarding levels. Tourism Scotland had provided funding. The Scottish Arts Council had given a generous grant. There’d been EU development money and lottery cash. Both the Scottish and British Governments had provided funding, not only promising tax breaks but giving the sort of generous official backing to the scheme that naturally encouraged private sector personal and hedge fund investment.
Such had been the level of financial support that the project was still cash-rich after recruiting the executive personnel and building most of the infra-structure, ahead of schedule, right on budget and without any serious setbacks. The weather had been factored into their timetable and there was already talk of the complex building – designed by a Scottish practice, of course – winning architectural awards.
Felix Baxter wasn’t going to let all that go down the pan because someone had been careless or inconsiderate enough to disappear. Damage limitation was one of his skills. He hadn’t needed it yet on a project thus far blessed by good fortune; but it was there when it needed to be called upon.
Their architect was on the island. She was Helena Davenport, 38 years old, internationally renowned, the chic, multi-lingual darling of her profession and a standard-bearing Scot of whom Scotland was rightfully proud. If she’d been the one to vanish … well, that didn’t really bear thinking about. It was a perspective from which Baxter felt quite grateful their fatal casualty had been uncharismatic workhorse nobody Captain Sensible and not his glamorous trophy creative.
The glamour hadn’t really been a factor in Helena’s selection from his short-list. She’d been as talented as any of the other names there, but her gender had swung it for him. It did a developer no harm to champion feminism in so male-dominated a profession as architecture. It earned positive headlines above sympathetic stories in the liberal press titles. But Helena was voluptuously photogenic in her stylish designer outfits and the glamour, for Baxter, was the icing on the cake.
At noon on Saturday, he put a personal phone call in to Greg Cody’s wife. Officially, since no body had been discovered, the man’s status was still listed as missing rather
than deceased. But if he wasn’t on the island, he was in the water. And he definitely wasn’t on the island. In the water, at this time of the year, the temperature of the North Atlantic meant that a fit man fully immersed in it had about ten minutes of life left to him. Greg Cody had been fit, but this statistic meant he was emphatically dead. So Baxter to his own mind was actually putting in a call to Captain Sensible’s widow.
‘May I call you Janet?’
‘Yes of course, Mr. Baxter.’
‘Felix, please.’
‘It’s good of you to call yourself, Felix.’
‘I wanted to offer you my deepest condolences. They’re sincerely meant, so of course I had to offer them myself.’
Her breath hitched. She said, ‘You don’t think there’s any possibility he’s alive? He’s only been gone nine hours.’
Cody had lived in Epsom in Surrey. There was no reason for his Surrey widow to be an authority on hypothermia. There was no hope on New Hope, but wishful thinking was human nature, another of Baxter’s areas of expertise.
He said, ‘I’ve authorized an interim payment. It might sound callous to mention compensation at so early a stage as this, but I want money to be one consideration you know is well taken care of. You’ve enough anxiety and stress to cope with in your grief.’
There was that hitch in her breathing again; she said, ‘Thank you.’
‘I know you shared a bank account with your husband. A hundred thousand pounds will be paid into that account this morning. There’ll be further sums to follow, of course.’
‘You’re very kind.’
He knew he could afford to be. Ultimately the bill would be met by his company’s insurers.
‘I’d ask one favour of you, Janet. And it’s for your own sake, to save you unnecessary heartache. It’s that you don’t speak to the press. They look for the lurid in tragic circumstances such as these. I had a reporter cold-call me first-thing asking was Greg depressed and a possible candidate for suicide. I told him in no uncertain terms that the suspicion was deeply offensive.’
The Colony Trilogy Page 52