When she reached the quay and the water’s edge she turned to look at her handiwork, rising backed by the crags behind it. She knew something of New Hope’s enigmatic history and unlucky reputation. She thought her design might have been influenced subconsciously by that knowledge. There was just the slight suggestion of a fortress or redoubt about the complex from this distance. It looked built to defend itself and not just from elemental assault.
She sat and drank her coffee. In her isolation there, she reflected on who and where she was in her life. And she thought that there were areas of her existence she really needed to improve upon. The coke habit was only manageable because she told herself it was. It was undignified at her age and she really ought to quit the stuff for good. And her romantic life was an oxymoron. What was she doing with a callow narcissist possessed of a combination of good looks and immaturity that would make his cheating on her simply inevitable?
She smiled to herself. Maybe there was something to what Felix Baxter said about being incommunicado here and it clarifying your thinking. She was in the mood suddenly for resolutions. The time to put them into practice was straight away. Life was too short for anything else, as Greg Cody had just demonstrated in the saddest way possible. She thought that the more she pondered on it more likely an accident than suicide, proof that none of us knew how long we had and a sober lesson in the folly of prevarication. ‘The time is now,’ she said to the sea, the breeze, to the briny air.
The ascent on the way back, even in the pallid sunlight, made her perspire and look forward to her bath. She adjusted the water temperature running the single fashionable tap into the slate coloured tub and returned to the sitting room, stripping off her clothes to her underwear and letting the garments trail her on the waxed-wood floor, putting some music on, cranking up the volume through the concealed speakers in the walls and ceiling, listening to the Elbow anthem My Sad Captains, enjoying Guy Garvey’s lugubriously beautiful voice, humming along, unclipping her bra and shrugging down and stepping out of her panties, naked with her back to the window.
When the room abruptly went dark, and over the music, she heard something thump against the glass behind her, heard the pane shudder. She turned sharply, as light slipped across the room again, aware of nothing substantially different. She went into the bathroom and turned off the tap. Then she went back and switched off the music. She walked to the window. A vertical crack now ran the length of the pane. She knew this was impossible. She knew the hardness coefficient of the glass. She ran a finger along the crack. The interior surface felt smooth under her fingertip. The crack wasn’t the depth of the full thickness of the pane. It would still need to be replaced, though; visibly flawed now, its integrity fatally compromised.
Helena saw that something had snagged at about head height in the fissure in the pane’s exterior. At first she thought, incredulously, that it was a scrap of seaweed. But it wasn’t. Nor was it the feather from an eagle or an albatross, which would have made at least a modicum of sense. Instead it was a single hair, coarse and thick and as black as pitch.
Chapter Three
It was almost three in the afternoon when Ruthie Gillespie and Phil Fortescue got back from the pub. The fire in her wood burner had gone out and her sitting room had become chilly as a consequence. He glanced around for newspaper to screw up under kindling re-lighting it, but she shifted her head to one side and gave him the sort of frank look that said they’d not only be warmer but happier too upstairs in bed.
She was right about that, they were both warm and happy and then afterwards they dozed off, waking ravenous just after 6pm, by which time it had long gone dark.
‘A day goes nowhere,’ Fortescue said, pulling on his jeans.
‘I don’t fancy cooking,’ Ruthie said.
‘Then it’s back to the Spyglass,’ he said.
‘We’ve totally gone to the dogs.’
‘I’ve led you astray, Ruthie,’ he said, leaning across the bed to where she was dressing on its other side, kissing her bare shoulder.
‘I was headed in that direction anyway,’ she said. ‘It’s my default route.’
‘How many words did you write in the week?’
‘I’m averaging 2, 000 a day.’
‘So you did 10, 000 words.’
‘Just over, actually.’
‘At the length you write, that’s a third of a book. I’d hardly call that kind of industry going to the dogs.’
‘You’re right, Phil. It’s you, corrupting me. I was fine till you came along. Are you going to do anything do you think, about New Hope?’
‘I’ll tell you over dinner,’ he said. ‘I’m too hungry to think, let alone speak.’
They found two chairs in an alcove at the pub with a barrel between them serving as a table. They ordered from the bar menu. There were nautical charts in narrow brass frames mounted on the alcove’s walls and an oil painting of a clipper canting alarmingly as storm waves broke over its bow, threatening to engulf the vessel. Their yellowy light came from a ship’s lantern hung above them and they didn’t really speak until their food arrived and they’d eaten a few fortifying mouthfuls each.
‘Sometimes,’ Fortescue said, ‘fish and chips is exactly what the doctor ordered.’
‘On the subject of doctors,’ Ruthie said, ‘where’s Thomas Horan’s journal now?’
‘It’s in the archive at the museum in Liverpool. Since his bloodline dried up at the battle of the Somme in 1916, there was no family member to claim it. It’s my property unless someone else tries to establish a claim and no one would because there’s no intrinsic value to it. History had forgotten him.’
‘You only lent it to the museum?’
‘More a case of storage, I doubt anyone’s touched it since me. The museum’s concerned with maritime history, not the occult. I could have them send it to me, but think I’ll go and pick it up personally on Monday morning after leaving here.’
‘And then what?’
‘Tomorrow I’m going to do some internet research into academics who’ll likely know something about occult and folkloric beliefs in West Africa in the early 19th century. I’ll try and make an appointment to see someone with some expertise on that early next week. So it’s Liverpool and then probably Oxford or Cambridge, depending.’
Ruthie was quiet for a moment. Then she said, ‘Is this a case of trying to determine exactly what it is you’re up against? Have you discussed this strategy with Patsy?’
‘I’m not up against anything, Ruthie. And I’ll tell Patsy what I’m looking into but there is no strategy. Cody’s disappearance is a mystery that’s made me curious about the island again. It goes no further or deeper than that.’
‘Not yet, it doesn’t.’
‘And it very likely won’t,’ he said.
‘What did Horan say about the sorcerer?’
‘That tribally he was Albacheian. Horan called him the Lizard Man. His skin was tattooed to resemble scales and his teeth were filed to points and he was very thin. His name was Shaddeh and he claimed to be a healer, though he could do other much less wholesome things than heal. Said he’d been born to it. Spoke English, learned from a missionary he said had been intent on martyrdom.’
‘Was that a joke?’
‘More the truth spoken in jest, I think. Shaddeh had a rather dry sense of humour.’
They had finished eating and were huddled against the cold outside the pub so that Ruthie could smoke when she said, ‘You could probably find out what you need to know on my laptop on the internet tomorrow.’
Fortescue shook his head. He said, ‘Anyone can say anything without substantiating their claims on the internet. People discuss this stuff without ever citing sources. On any forum discussing matters magical or paranormal, 90 per cent of those contributing are speculative cranks. I need someone objective and authoritative who can give me a proper perspective.’
‘I sometimes forget you were an academic yourself.’
‘I still
am.’
‘You don’t look like one.’
He grinned. ‘Is that a come-on?’
‘Absolutely,’ she said.
He thought it remarkable, what a decent meal could do for a person’s libido, thinking maybe it should actually be thought of as an indecent meal.
‘We’ll have a nightcap, Professor,’ she said, reading his mind. ‘Then I’m afraid it’s back to bed.’
Alice Lang had been a distinguished psychiatrist. She’d also been a genuine and gifted psychic. It was how Patrick Lassiter had met his wife, heading up investigations on the murder squad at New Scotland Yard she’d felt compelled to assist with after seeing things to which most other people were happily blind.
Their romance had begun just before the New Hope expedition seven years ago. She’d gone as their psychic, so he’d felt obliged to go to take care of her there. He considered in taking him on, she’d saved his life and he was in her debt. Also, by then he was deeply in love with her.
She’d been among those to die on New Hope when circumstances had compelled them to go back there 18 months ago. Eight of them had gone to the island then in the end. And only four had lived to return from it. The four were Lassiter, Ruthie Gillespie, Phil Fortescue and Edith Chambers. Lassiter was alone at the wave-swamped ruin of the crofter’s cottage out of which Alice had been dragged by the sea and drowned. He had a full whisky bottle raised at his lips, already grateful for the oblivion the drink had not yet brought him when he smelled his wife’s perfume and felt the flutter of her hair, wind-blown, on his face. And he heard two words spoken in her familiar voice.
Those words were, Patrick, please.
He left the island a little over 24 hours after hearing those words, but already bent on returning. He requested and was granted his leave of absence from the Cold Case team at the Met assigned to murder investigations. He went back to New Hope to rebuild the ruined cottage. It was a tangible challenge that could occupy his mind and body and he could mourn fittingly in solitude. Of course he hoped to feel his wife’s presence again and thought that likeliest in the place where she’d died. But that was a secret so closed he kept it almost from himself.
He told Edie this in the conservatory of the house he’d shared with Alice during six blissfully happy years of life together. Nowhere near enough, but better than nothing and more than he would have conceivably imagined when she’d first invited him into her life.
‘You sell yourself short, Patsy. I expect you always have.’
He shook his head. He said, ‘I was a sour drunk back then, patronizing and surly. That’s how I was towards him when I first met your stepfather, before the New Hope expedition. Can you believe that, when Phil Fortescue’s one of the finest men I’ve ever met?’
‘That wasn’t you, it was the booze.’
‘It was me drinking the booze, Edie.’
‘What was your frame of mind when you went back?’
‘Haunted,’ he said. ‘I kept wondering whether Alice had seen her own death in the moments leading up to it.’
‘We’ve never know,’ Edie said.
‘I think I know,’ Lassiter said. ‘I think we both do.’
‘How did you manage? I mean with no shelter and no food.’
Someone had tipped off the Southern Isles Area Police Command. Lassiter never found out who that was. But it was summer and the sea was often calm enough for the crossing and some of the officers based at Stornoway took to making it, bringing supplies for their very own Ben Gunn, the Scotland Yard Met Police Commander taking an island sabbatical.
‘Never, ever believe the bad things people say about the Scots,’ Lassiter said to Edie. ‘A builder came to advise on the cottage reconstruction and ended up staying a fortnight in a frame tent he’d brought. A trawler dropped anchor and they paddled in an old wooden rowing boat with a pair of oars for me. A couple of young lads came and taught me the basics of sea angling and donated me a rod.’
‘Fishermen steer well clear of New Hope, don’t they?’
‘Generally they do, they’re a superstitious breed. They can just about tolerate the island’s southern apex, away from the surf and the reefs. And they were curious about me.’
And all the while, Rachel Ballantyne left you in peace?’
‘Yes,’ he said, nodding. ‘I’d brought a stock of tinned and powdered food and thought to live on that, when suddenly on July evenings I was barbecuing fresh fish on the beach and the cottage was almost complete and I was learning to accommodate grief without being in a constant state of despair. We’d had the time we’d had and I had that comfort to cling to.’
Edie said, ‘In a sense, this was your island honeymoon.’
Lassiter sipped tea. He’d made them a mug each. It was quite warm in the conservatory, despite the chill outside. It was fully dark, now. He said, ‘You’re going to be a brilliant journalist, Edie.’
‘You’re biased.’
‘You are, though.’
‘You had your New Hope honeymoon. The hostility only began when the secrets started revealing themselves.’
‘See?’
‘Tell me that part, Patsy.’
They both knew the island harboured secret places. One of these had been revealed to them there 18 months earlier. It was the cellar store where Ballantyne’s colonists had kept the whisky they’d distilled before selling it to merchants from the mainland. It was a substantial space hewn out of the stone ground close to the colonists’ quay.
One of the experts on the original expedition, the forensic archeologist Jesse Kale, had believed there to be a large communal storm shelter on New Hope. He thought a run of severe Atlantic winters somewhere so exposed would oblige them to build one and it would be in the nature of their community to face their elemental enemy collectively.
The virologist Jane Chambers had thought there a plague pit on the island, a mass burial site which would explain the original vanishing. She’d been wrong about the cause of that, but New Hope thrived for a dozen years before the catastrophe. Some among its men, women and children would have perished from natural causes during that period. Yet there were no individual graves on the island. That pointed to the excavation of a catacomb or sepulchre to house their dead in the period of the colony’s prosperity and contentment.
‘I thought that both those places probably existed,’ Lassiter said to Edie. ‘The colony settlement is surrounded by a wall, but it’s not far from the island’s heights and in bad weather would have been mercilessly exposed. So the storm shelter idea made sense.
‘But the catacomb theory was even more compelling. Child mortality ran at 50 per cent back in those days. Cholera and diphtheria routinely killed their victims. They got lead poisoning from the paint they used and died of tetanus when dirt got into their cuts. No one survived appendicitis.’
‘The good old days,’ Edie said.
‘Unless the subjects of Seamus Ballantyne’s Kingdom of Belief buried their dead at sea, there was a mass tomb.’
‘And you found it.’
‘I found both those places eventually. And it was after I did that the mood of the island began to shift towards me.’
‘Have you got much in?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘For the dinner I’m cooking you.’
Lassiter smiled. Edie could make him smile and was grateful for the fact. His face was composed of the hard planes of someone who’d seen too much life. He was lean and tough looking and burdened by sorrow. His smile was a gift. His gaze moved away, travelled back the Hebrides, and he resumed his story.
It was a fair bet at least some of the colonists would have been coal or maybe tin miners in their former lives. And some of them would have been the men who dug the canals in the early years of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. They would have had the instinct, the know-how and the wherewithal to dig. Excavation would have been second nature to them.
The logical place for their storm shelter was close to the colony settleme
nt. Not under it, because if a bad storm leveled its buildings, that could trap them underground and they’d likely die of suffocation before being able to dig their way out. Lassiter discovered it, finally, looking between the settlement’s perimeter wall and the island’s heights, a small aperture concealed by a stunted stand of thick-trunked bushes that he crawled into holding a torch. After a couple of feet it became a passage it was possible to stand erect in that opened out after forty feet into a large gallery.
‘It was a natural geological feature they’d discovered and then expanded,’ he said. ‘They’d flattened out the floor using chisels and hammers. The marks are still visible. And they’d gouged and drilled at the rock, excavating further, until the space was sufficiently sized to shelter their entire population.’
‘Bloody hell,’ Edith said. ‘How did you find their mass tomb?’
‘That was about a fortnight later,’ Lassiter said, ‘no detection involved. It was the singing led me to that.’
Helena Davenport was spooked. She tried for an hour after dark to tell herself it was cocaine withdrawal that was itching at her scalp and making her heart take those fluttering lurches but she was hard to fool and even harder to fool when she was the one attempting to do the fooling. She tried to listen to music, but that strategy didn’t work. She loved Elbow and she liked Ed Sheeran and in bombastic moods Kasabian and she could even tolerate a bit of Coldplay. But she was too alert to the possibility of someone sneaking up on her to willfully drown out noises she sensed she needed now to be alert to.
It was about 8pm. She was sipping wine from a large glass she’d filled from a very good bottle of Merlot. She was watching the movie 300, trying to concentrate on what elsewhere would have been her enjoyable appreciation of Gerard Butler’s six pack, when she heard a ponderous, rhythmic beating at the main door downstairs.
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