There were two lies in this statement. Baxter hadn’t spoken to a reporter. And the protocols he insisted upon anyway made cold-calling him impossible.
His words had the desired effect, however. Janet Cody was sobbing freely on the other end of the line, now. She said, ‘Greg has never been depressed for one moment in his entire life. Little things make him happy, DIY, barbecues in the garden.’
It irked Baxter slightly, this stubborn use of the present tense talking about the deceased Captain Sensible. But it was understandable.
‘I’ll speak to no one, Felix. I swear that.’ There was a pause. She said, ‘His memory’s too precious to have his character dragged through the mud.’
This woman was living proof to Baxter that there was someone for everyone, however lumpen and unlovable. ‘Those are my sentiments entirely, my dear,’ he said.
‘I’m not giving up hope, Felix,’ she said. ‘He’s only been gone nine hours.’
‘That’s your privilege, Janet,’ he said.
Baxter concluded the call, after saying a few more comforting words, quite satisfied. Since the actual details of Cody’s death had been successfully fudged, his publicity people could still insinuate suicide if that yet proved to be contingent. At the moment, a tragic accident seemed the interpretation thought least likely to bring unnecessary attention. One death was acceptable in so ambitious a project and they’d planned for a fatality because statistically, on so substantial a build at so challenging a site, it had actually been quite likely.
They couldn’t, though, afford another as mysterious as this first had been. It was one thing dealing with the police and coastguard. Fending off inquisitive reporters was much trickier. And the internet meant rumour spread at the speed of light. So far there had been nothing but goodwill in response to their regular announcements, their bulletins and updates on the progress towards the opening of the New Hope Island Experience.
That might change if one of the men it had awoken mentioned his departing scream as the last of Greg Cody. It had roused and no doubt spooked all of them there. But they’d all signed binding confidentiality agreements and he’d only worry about this gruesome detail when he’d have to, if it leaked.
In terms of negative publicity, the death of their site manager wasn’t quite a lunatic running amok with an assault rifle at Thorpe Park. But New Hope could be a sombre, daunting location and bad things had happened there before and they’d done so inexplicably. Baxter had rehabilitated the island with great success and wanted desperately for that success to be sustained and built upon. He believed in the dream and wanted it fully realized. He’d do all he could, to see that it was.
He wondered, in the immediate term, whether getting Helena Davenport off New Hope might be a pragmatic move. But she was only scheduled to be there until Monday, for just two more nights.
What’s the worst that can happen? He thought.
Edie Chambers had lunch that Saturday with Patsy Lassiter. To her, he was family. She loved Phil Fortescue, her wicked stepfather, and she liked Ruthie Gillespie both as a person and for the happiness their relationship had brought him. She had a special bond too with Patsy. They were the New Hope survivors. There weren’t many of them left. She’d suffered a lot of bereavement for someone only 20, not yet graduated from university.
At the age of 14 she’d encountered a ghost. Much of what had happened subsequently had happened as a consequence of that. Her ghost in life had been Jacob Parr, a second-mate aboard Seamus Ballantyne’s slave vessel Andromeda. Parr had provided the clues that led eventually to her stepfather finding Thomas Horan’s journal in a closed shaft at the long abandoned Elsinore Pit in Barnsley. He hadn’t been her stepfather then; he’d just been a kind maritime academic, a stranger prepared to answer an adolescent girl’s desperate plea for help.
Now, to Patsy Lassiter, she said, ‘I’ve got the chance to interview Felix Baxter.’ Her degree course was journalism, which she was studying at London’s City University.
‘That’s quite a coup,’ he said.
‘Tell me what you really think.’
‘It poses a question, Edie. Does this mean going back to New Hope?’
‘You went back. You stayed for six months.’
‘My wife died there. I needed the time and the space to reconcile myself. And the privacy, I needed that too.’
‘What I mean is you survived the experience. You were left alone.’
‘The very phrase I used when I took a call from Felix Baxter this morning. One of his people on the island vanished in the early hours. At 3 o’clock this morning a site foreman named Greg Cody was heard to scream, though Baxter omitted that detail from his account. Cody had vanished. I don’t think they’ll find him any time soon. I don’t think they’ll find him at all.’
‘So New Hope’s dangerous again?’
‘It’s inherently dangerous and innately hostile and always will be.’
‘Yet you rebuilt the crofter’s cottage there and stayed for half a year.’
‘An experience that answered a need in me,’ he said. He looked her in the eye, ‘If I’d returned to work in the weeks after Alice’s death I’d have started drinking again. I’m certain of that. New Hope was a suitable place for exile, a necessity for me just then. That said, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone of a nervous disposition.’
‘I’m not of a nervous disposition, Patsy.’
‘It’s foolhardy at best for you to go there.’
‘Baxter’s New Hope Experience brochure makes it look absolutely beautiful,’ Edith said.
‘Beauty and danger aren’t mutually exclusive.’ He smiled. ‘Often the contrary is true.’
Edie nodded. She knew this. Her feelings about the island were ambivalent. Had her mother not gone on the expedition seven years earlier, she’d never have met the clever detective she was sharing a table with, who had also gone. She’d never have met the stepfather who’d given her mother the happiest years of her too short romantic life. It was sometimes terrifying when the other-worldly intruded into your own life, but it made living a much deeper experience.
How had her mum put it? She’d said it was swapping a small room for a huge hall of mirrors. All the certainties disappeared, but they were replaced by possibilities that were so vast they were endless. She’d thought it an ordeal all those years ago when Jacob Parr had come in the night and shown her the wheals in the flesh of his back from the flogging he’d been given for drunkenness aboard the Andromeda. In retrospect though, she thought she’d actually been privileged to be singled out for her haunting.
Lassiter said, ‘When’s your interview set for?’
‘He’s only agreed in principle. We haven’t nailed it down yet and he might change his mind, after this disappearance.’
‘He won’t,’ Lassiter said.
‘I’m only a student.’
‘Egos like his don’t discriminate when it comes to attention. Anyway you’re a bright and amenable student. Assuming he does grant the interview, have you found anywhere you might place the piece?’
‘I’ve had a couple of big magazines say they’re interested. They have three month lead times and want something substantial to coincide with the grand opening. The June editions actually appear at the end of April. Publication depends on the strength of the article, but I’m pretty confident that if I write it, it will run somewhere.’
‘You’ll write it to the best of your ability, which definitely means going back to the island. You’ll have to tour the complex they’ve built there. He’ll probably take you himself aboard his helicopter. It has a facsimile of his signature coach-painted onto its doors.’
‘He’s not at all your sort of person, is he, Patsy.’
‘Not many people are, Edie.’
‘I don’t seem to ruffle your feathers.’
‘You’re the exception that proves the rule. How’re Phil and Ruthie, by the way. Still getting on?’
‘Like a house on fire.’
‘That’s a
horrible cliché for an aspiring journalist.’
‘It’s true, though. They’re mad about one another.’
‘Good to hear,’ Lassiter said.
Edith sipped from her glass and put it down carefully onto the table. She folded her arms across her chest. ‘Do you think there’ll be more disappearances from New Hope?’
‘It’s impossible to say without going there and investigating what happened to Baxter’s man.’
‘And it’s very early days. Actually less than a day.’
‘He’s not there Edie, which means he’s gone, irrespective of the time-frame.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘As far as I know, the Western Isles police have no leads and the fellow who vanished usually had both feet firmly on the ground.’
‘So Greg Cody didn’t walk into the sea.’
‘If he did, he didn’t leave a note.’
‘What did Felix Baxter want from you?’
‘Something I couldn’t provide him with,’ Lassiter said. ‘He wanted a clean bill of health for the island. He was after reassurance and I couldn’t give him that. I could only tell him truthfully that I was left alone there.’
‘Have you discussed this with Phil?’
‘Yes, this morning.’
‘And you didn’t think to ask about him and Ruthie?’
‘Since I knew we were having lunch together, much easier to wait and ask you, Edie.’
‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘Men.’
‘Can’t fault you there, Jesus was by all reliable accounts a man.’
‘I’ll bet you’ve told Phil more about your New Hope Island exile than you shared with Baxter,’ Edith said. She was smiling now.
‘Then you wouldn’t lose your money. I told him I was watched there and that the observation was hostile.’
‘The spirit of poor dead Rachel Ballantyne,’ Edie said, with a shiver.
‘No,’ Lassiter said, ‘I had the feeling this was even worse.’
‘What could be worse?’
‘Rachel Ballantyne was human, once.’
‘Are we talking monsters?’
He didn’t answer straight away. Then he said, ‘Monster, singular. But it was really just an intuition.’
‘I’d love to know how you managed on New Hope for six months, what you did, what you actually found there. You’re a curious man, Patsy, in both senses. You uncovered secrets there, didn’t you?’
He smiled at her. He placed his knife and fork on the table to either side of his plate and leaned against the back of his chair. He said, ‘How much time do you have?’
‘I’m a student. It’s the weekend. You’re the one with the schedule to keep.’
‘Not on a Saturday in London, Edie. Not since Alice’s death, at least. I’ve all afternoon and no good reason to keep anything secret from you.’
He was glad of the company, she thought, with a sorrowful blossoming of sympathy in her chest. She wondered how hard it was for him not to drink just to fill his empty evenings. He looked well enough. She hadn’t been to their house in Maida Vale since before Alice’s death. She would go there this afternoon, though, she decided. She’d invite herself.
‘We’ll go back to your place, Patsy,’ she said. ‘If the story’s any good, I might cook you dinner tonight.’
‘It’s a deal,’ he said.
Of course the story was good, Edie Chambers thought. Finding things out was what Patsy Lassiter did. More than that, it was largely what he was for. He was a much nicer man than he mostly pretended to be to most people. But it was her abiding belief he’d been born to solve mysteries.
‘Do you think your monster took Greg Cody?’
He frowned and gestured to a waitress for their bill. He said, ‘If it’s there, it’s the island’s monster. But Cody didn’t disappear voluntarily.’
Helena Davenport was bored. She’d done all her coke the previous night and couldn’t now get through to her boyfriend. Since he was her boyfriend of only seven weeks and a decade younger than she was, she was quite naturally concerned to keep him corralled. This wasn’t possible in the Atlantic Hebridean wilderness of New Hope Island, because phones didn’t work there. She wasn’t used to failure and it was pissing her off.
They had some solar power at the visitor complex she’d designed, largely out of the need for the design to push all the relevant buttons when it came to political correctness. It hadn’t cost anything, subsidies had paid for it, but she reckoned its actual contribution to providing light or heating water would be negligible until at least June.
They had wind turbines too. These were more contentious than solar panels because some significant environmentalists considered them a blight on the landscape. The eminent mountaineer Sir Chris Bonnington had successfully opposed their spread in the English Lake District. The Scottish Government liked them, though, which had been the deal-clincher. Helena didn’t think them a particular eyesore, but they were noisy, the power they generated couldn’t be stored and wind-strength could never be accurately predicted. So they weren’t trustworthy. None of this really mattered, since a subsidy paid too for their construction and when they were brought into play, their maintenance.
The water for the long hot bath she was contemplating having would be heated by the same power-source that kept the lights burning in the ceiling above her and chilled the walk-in fridge in the suite’s spacious kitchen. And that was an old-fashioned oil-burning generator about as far from renewables as it was possible to get. It was big, powerful, dirty, thirsty, costly and dependable and they actually had a pair of them, just in the unlikely event the one they were depending upon ever failed.
Hypocrisy and pragmatism were close bed-fellows in Helena’s line of work and the fictitious claims made in parts of Felix Baxter’s glossy New Hope Experience brochure gave her no sleepless nights as a consequence. Architects were required to be quite adept politically if they were going to be involved with substantial projects at environmentally sensitive locations. It was just the modern way.
The generators were kind of a dirty secret, hidden away forty feet below surface-level in bunkers hewn from the rock before construction above them had ever begun. In everything naked to the eye, by contrast, Helena had gone for the vernacular. The public areas of the complex were built from deliberately rough-hewn granite blocks. The stone hadn’t been quarried on the island, that would have been an environmental crime; but it was exactly the same in character as the indigenous stuff present there.
The timber fascias of the suites and lodges and guest apartments had been treated so they’d bleach and weather to look more and more in character over the years like driftwood. The wood hadn’t come from the island’s tide-lines, but it had come from a sustainable source and the way she’d used it, its accents and details, gave the complex a hand-fashioned, human dimension where it might otherwise have looked monumental.
The windows were important. From the outside they were tinted so that sunlight didn’t reflect off them in a way Helena Davenport always thought of as flashily corporate. They had the low, wide dimensions of cinemascope movie screens so that from the inside, they made the most of their spectacular Atlantic vistas. The glass was immensely tough, bullet-proof to stand up to the withering strength of the onshore winds in the winter storm-season. They’d been the most expensive element of the entire build, but Baxter had only glanced at her budget proposal and smiled and nodded. By that point, the project was awash with investment cash. And though her client had his numerous flaws, scrimping wasn’t one of them.
The flaw with the complex, she thought exasperatedly, was communication. Baxter had characteristically presented this as a positive, saying the island’s isolation from email and text and phone and internet access generally made it a happy sanctuary from the energy sapping preoccupations of the day-to-day world. A sojourn on New Hope was an opportunity to restore and replenish your creative energies without distraction. Contemplate in peace, he said; give your ideas and
inspirations the virgin birth they deserve, he challenged.
It was all bullshit. Helena wanted to challenge young Jacques to find out whether he was contemplating any mischief and to put a stop to it if he was. To do that she’d have to use the big analogue transmitter at the workers’ base at the opposite end of the island and she’d have to do so with a radio operator helping her and listening in because the rig was complex and required technical know-how to use. And Jacques, at the other end, would have to be a radio ham to pick up the transmission and she didn’t think her new boyfriend that.
She decided she’d have a walk before taking her bath, not far, just down to the cobbled quay Ballantyne’s colonists had built 200 years ago. She could see that through the picture window of her suite sitting room, below her, a quarter of a mile away, weak sunlight glazing the stones and making a tranquil sea shimmer beyond.
She laced on her hiking boots and filled a flask with coffee, stuffing a cagoul with the flask into her small rucksack aware that the weather could change very quickly and without warning in this part of the world. When she got outside, the air felt mild against her exposed skin and the sunlight had coaxed just a hint of honey from the heather and scrub in the thin soil on the rocks descending to the sea. That changed as she approached the cobbles of the dock, salt filling her nostrils with its sharp tang, the world utterly silent beyond the ambient sounds of breaking wavelets and seagull cries.
She thought briefly about the missing man. She’d only been told about Cody’s disappearance that same morning by one of the security guys, literally cap in hand, calling on her to break the news formally about the apparently fatal casualty the island had claimed. She was sorry. She had liked Cody for his equable temperament facing challenges she tended to escalate into crises without someone phlegmatic around. He’d been quietly and stolidly dependable and to her mind an improbable candidate for suicide. Despite that though, he’d never struck her either as at all careless or accident-prone. It was a mystery.
There was a wife, of whom Cody had spoken adoringly when she’d shared a beer with him on nights back when the Experience complex had been little more than a blueprint and a set of foundations. It was a paradoxical characteristic of all of the men on the island. They doted on partners and children they all missed terribly in their willing isolation from their families. They were providing financial security in the only way they could.
The Colony Trilogy Page 53