Higher education had not figured in Felix Baxter’s life. Like most young men eager to make their fortune he’d lacked the patience for that. He’d gone instead the Richard Branson route and started a business when he was the same age as his son was now. His background had been solidly working class – dad a foreman at an engineering works and mum a nurse – so there’d been no capital to back his first enterprise.
He’d started off selling second-hand motorbikes and graduated to second-hand cars. When he’d made enough money doing that he’d bought the first of the run-down properties he’d do up. He got into this at the right time, in the mid-1990s when the property collapse of the early part of the decade meant that there was still precious little confidence in the market. By the boom of the late 90s he had a large enough portfolio to make a killing, which he did. He sold off his auto dealership and moved from domestic property into clubs, pubs, leisure centres and gyms.
He had his finger nowadays in lots of pies. He ran the biggest public venue door-security firm in the north east of England. He put on boxing shows and promoted rock concerts. His real and consistent talent though seemed to be for finding a theme that made the specific location he was marketing attractive to the punters.
His flagship restaurant and bar in his home city were patronised by top-flight footballers and reality TV and soap stars. He’d created a golf course on the Northumberland coast prestigious enough to stage world-ranking tournaments. He’d opened half a dozen upmarket caravan parks – all at obsolete RAF airfields – on spectacular coastal sites in Cumbria and Wales.
Felix Baxter hadn’t quite done it all, though. He hadn’t yet made the Sunday Times Rich List. The New Hope Experience easily ranked as his most ambitious project to date and therefore as his biggest career gamble. The inspiration for it seemed to come partly from the Center Parcs model and partly from what Peter de Savary had tried to do at Land’s End in Cornwall. The rest of it, he must have dreamed up personally.
The New Hope Experience was going to be somewhere you could either become immersed in Celtic mysticism or ride the longest, fastest zip-wire in Europe. You could jet ski or sea kayak there; or you could just enjoy the solitude. You could study the abundant wildlife, at one with the wilderness. Or you could rock climb on some of the most demanding pitches in the British Isles.
The environmental credentials of the residential complex he’d had built there were impeccable. Cost alone would deter the riff-raff, it was subtly implied. The rates were eye-wateringly high. But guests would anyway be discretely vetted, before being invited to apply for their fortnight’s residence as members of the New Hope Community.
Edie thought she got what it was all about; it was a place to which rich people would go to indulge themselves while feeling creative and worthwhile. You could live it up there and have your sins against nature absolved while doing it because of what you’d paid and where you’d had the taste and sensitivity to come. On New Hope, by some subtle osmosis, the soulless would be endowed with spirituality and the trivial gain gravitas. And the sheep given to following the fashion flock’s shepherd would, well; they’d flock there, wouldn’t they?
The New Hope Experience was a very modern concept. It created a demand because it answered in them what those wealthy enough to go there fooled themselves into believing was a need. And on forward bookings it was already a sell-out success.
Edie looked at pictures of the man. Felix Baxter had a ready smile but she couldn’t source a single shot in which the humour reached his eyes. He was prematurely grey and slender and quite tall and had an obvious weakness for well-cut Savile Row suits. He favoured wristwatches with clunky cases and faces busy with sub-dials.
He lacked any distinctive features or characteristics other than that air of detachment, which actually had the effect of making his appearance quite vague. She thought his would be a difficult face to draw or describe or pick out with any certainty in an identity parade. Perhaps that was why he wasn’t a man to Patsy Lassiter’s taste. But she thought there likely other reasons, just as good, for that.
Felix Baxter had travelled to the Maritime Museum in Liverpool where he sat waiting in an area to which the general public never normally enjoyed access. It was Sunday morning and he was there to meet a museum staffer who would ordinarily have had the weekend off. She held the influential position of Keeper of Maritime Artefacts. His interest was in something left to the museum not long after its foundation in the early 19th century. He wasn’t generally engaged by history except where he believed it could be exploited for profit. But this morning’s mission was specific. He’d heard an intriguing story, a rumour, an urban myth about one particular artefact and was there only to discover for himself whether it was true.
A sea chest full of nautical belongings had been donated back then. They’d been the property of Seamus Ballantyne and the donator had been Ballantyne’s ex-wife. Divorce had been unusual in the period and generally frowned upon by polite society, but hers had been seen as fully justified. She’d been scandalized when her husband abandoned the respected office of slave-ship master to become a hellfire preacher. As he attempted to gather converts, bellowing out sermons atop a fruit crate on the harbour cobbles, Liverpool’s gentry sided unanimously with her.
Baxter wasn’t really interested in the woman he waited to meet. He was, however, greatly interested in her immediate predecessor in her role. That was Professor Phil Fortescue, a man with a strong link to New Hope, someone Baxter suspected had been party to some of the island’s most stubborn secrets.
Fortescue intrigued Baxter. He was a man of whom Baxter was instinctively wary, and he tended to trust his instincts. He was the reason Baxter had said yes when Fortescue’s stepdaughter Edie Chambers had approached him for an interview. Or he was the clincher, since Baxter might have said yes to Edie anyway. She’d been to New Hope too and might be holding onto insights of her own about the island.
The Keeper wasn’t late. Baxter was waiting because he’d been a quarter of an hour early. Generally he was tardy concerning appointments, which was deliberate and a habit dictated by status. But he was intrigued and a bit excited about what he was about to discover and experience and had paid a generous endowment to the museum, simply to engineer.
‘It’s a substantial sum, Mr. Baxter.’
‘It’s a goodwill offering,’ he’d said.
‘Can we do anything for you in return?’ They’d said.
‘Actually –’ he’d replied.
And after some bureaucratic fuddling, they’d agreed.
Now he wiled away the few minutes before his appointment thinking contentedly about the names he’d given the various locations on New Hope Island and just how richly atmospheric they sounded. There was Ballantyne Cove, Shanks’s Reach and the Gulf of Andromeda. There was Kingdom Heights, the Black Lagoon and Gibbet Hill.
He was still undecided about the early 19th century sailor’s tavern he’d dreamed up for the Cove. It might be slightly over the top, a bit contrived. They could always add it later. Grog and ship’s biscuits, ale and sea shanties; they’d call it The Hope and Glory, pack it to its oak rafters with antique nauticalia. Film companies using it for location shooting would make his pirate pub a lucrative earner in the off-season.
The Keeper arrived. She was short and plump and nondescript in a fawn suit and brass framed spectacles. After the niceties of introduction she said, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’
‘Generosity of the sort you’ve shown to the museum should be rewarded rather than punished, Mr. Baxter.’
‘What on earth does that mean?’
The lenses of her glasses reflected the bright ceiling lights above them. It meant that he couldn’t see her eyes to read her expression properly.
She said, ‘Ballantyne’s sea chest has always been burdened by reputation. None of the objects within it are ever exhibited here. The story is that collectively, they inflict bad luck.’
‘Superstition and the sea have been linked probably since our ancestors first pushed off aboard dug-out canoes and coracles. I keep an open mind. I’m suggesting pause for thought.’
‘Are you warning me?’
She blushed slightly. She said, ‘I’m merely informing you, as a courtesy. It’s something our Director said I should do before giving you the key to the chest.’
He took the key from her. He followed her precise directions. He located the chest where she said he would, in a basement room that felt a bit small and more confining than was entirely comfortable. The room was windowless and the overheads feeble and the warmth of an antique radiator gave the gloomy space a slightly fetid air. The chest was of brass-bound wood and had Ballantyne’s initials inlaid in mother of pearl in its lid. It was the first thing personal to the New Hope colony’s founder he had ever encountered and a thrill of wonder ran through him at the thought that this elusive man had really lived and breathed, dressed and eaten, spoken and drank.
And suffered a mysterious fate, he thought.
He sank to his haunches and put the key in the lock and turned and opened the trunk lid. He saw rolled navigation charts secured by ribbons and a boat cloak and leather boots and a dress sword with scrolling on its elaborate scabbard. The object he’d come there to see lay in a depression its solid weight had made in the black woven fabric of the boat cloak.
It was a silver pocket watch. It was a Breguet. It had an immaculate enamel face and blued steel hands. It was so collectible it was probably priceless and it was ticking audibly now the chest lid was open and when Baxter looked at his own wristwatch to check, he confirmed that it was showing the correct time.
He picked up Ballantyne’s Breguet. He could feel the mechanism pulsing strongly through the smooth precious metal of the case against his palm and the tips of his fingers. Handling the watch forged a link somehow intimate with the watch’s original owner and Baxter felt suddenly queasy at that thought as his palm began to perspire stickily under its weight and shape. It felt unpleasant to the touch, despite its rarity and refined pedigree. They’d been among the most accurate marine timepieces ever manufactured and he felt almost desperate to put it down and close the trunk lid on its ungovernable life.
He’d heard a theory concerning the story that Ballantyne’s pocket watch never wound down. It was claimed that kinetic energy from the alien spacecraft sent to abduct his colonists went on powering its movement indefinitely. This was a quite elegant theory, until it was pointed out that the Breguet never actually got nearer New Hope than Liverpool. It was a relic of its owner’s earlier, sea-faring life, prior to his religious epiphany. He’d left it behind among his other abandoned belongings for his ex-wife to dispose of.
He knew another story about the watch. It was that Phil Fortescue had taken it away on loan, had carried it with him for a couple of years following the sudden death of the wife he’d first met seven years ago on McIntyre’s New Hope Expedition. Her name had been Jane Chambers and she’d written and presented a prize-winning television series about the Black Death. And Baxter, in the bowels of the museum, in the presence of Ballantyne’s sea chest, was beginning to wonder how her widower had ever possessed the desire or fortitude to have the watch in his proximity.
He could still hear it ticking, with the trunk lid back down, with the sea chest locked again, or he imagined he could. Something about that small room impended. It was like laughter stifled or a drowned scream. The sweating had spread from his palms to his temples where it trickled down the sides of his face. His scalp itched with moisture. The boxed pocket watch seemed not so much to tick now as to chuckle with a cold sort of mechanical mirth, mocking and relentless. He felt claustrophobic down there and suddenly and almost overpoweringly, he felt as though disdainfully observed.
He felt the urge to rise and turn and flee. He heard something unstill shift or slither inside the chest and the instinct to do that grew stronger in him. Instead he forced himself to stand up slowly and turn deliberately and exit the room and walk up stone steps and along echoing corridors back the way he’d come. When he saw the Keeper waiting for him in the vestibule beyond the window panels of the last glass door he glanced at his watch and realized with a sick clutch of bewilderment that he’d only been down there alone for a total of about five minutes.
Alone?
‘Did you get what you were after, Mr. Baxter?’
‘It’s not a wind-up?’ The joke sounded far braver than he felt. He’d gone there hoping to disprove something that had just confounded him. The question it now begged was how many living mysteries had the New Hope colony’s founder left on the island itself?
The keeper shook her head. She said, ‘We’ve never had the need to wind the watch. Much less felt the inclination.’
He tried to smile. He said, ‘Thanks for your cooperation. It’s been an experience.’
‘Rather you than me, with respect,’ she said.
But the experience wasn’t quite concluded for him yet.
He walked out into the street. It was raining and the cobbles of the dock quarter around the museum were slick and the air above them a rain-tainted grey. Lights from passing vehicles bleared through it when he reached streets no longer pedestrianized. A car horn hooted angrily as he crossed at a busy junction, directionless, paying no heed to the traffic. He passed the stone steps and Deco accents in its masonry of a derelict cinema building.
A faded film poster loomed palely at the corner of his vision out of a tarnished metal frame. It showed a little girl, tawdrily attired in a period nightdress, at the door of a whitewashed cottage, seemingly weightless because her feet didn’t quite touch the ground, as her frozen gaze seemed to follow his progress walking by.
A horror film, he thought numbly, half a block on, his coat heavy across his shoulders and clinging to his knees with the rain now soaking it. One of those low budget American shockers that makes back its money over the opening weekend and dies its box-office death once its college kid demographic have been served up their popcorn thrills.
Except, Baxter thought, slowing and then stopping, seeing rain dance above a puddle in the street gutter to his left, the little girl in the poster really had been watching him. He’d seen her slowly turn her head as he passed by, hadn’t he?
He couldn’t have.
But he had.
He turned around and went back. The cinema building looked long abandoned, exposed stone through peeling white paintwork, the steps up to the entrance chipped and cracked, leading nowhere now. He noticed a padlock securing the grand main entrance and saw that the lozenges of decorative glass set into the wooden panels surrounding it were most of them cracked or gone entirely. Buildings of this sort, obsolete, hopeless really, sometimes made Felix Baxter feel a little melancholy. Today, though, he climbed the steps and approached the film poster for a closer look, feeling something instead more coldly akin to dread.
There was a poster in the frame. But the paper, laminated once he thought, was sun-blistered and bleached by a host of city summers and whatever it had once depicted had long since disappeared. It showed nothing. There was not even the ghost of an image discernible there. He shivered. He was an imaginative man. He knew that about himself. His business career testified emphatically to the fact. He possessed vision, he really did. But visions didn’t generally possess him.
He looked around, getting his bearings, gathering himself, forcing his mind to clarify and map a mental route to where he’d parked his car. He was certain about who and where he was. But he could still hear the rhythmic tick in his mind of Ballantyne’s pocket watch and he was a few blocks on before the strong sensation of feeling watched finally weakened and left him completely.
By the time they checked into the Vincent Hotel on Lord Street in Southport for the night, Phil Fortescue had found his specialist in African tribal magic. It was an esoteric, even obscure area of study, challenging because written p
rimary sources were non-existent. The oral tradition was fine in some sets of circumstances. But the dead languages of vanished tribes created imponderable mysteries and imposed a silence that would last until eternity.
Because it was an arcane area of scholarship, the specialists all knew one another. And there didn’t seem to be much professional jealousy between them. It being a Sunday actually facilitated what he was doing because the people he contacted were on their leisure time rather than lecturing. Most of them recognized his name. Various people were recommended or ruled out on the basis of their specialisms in the emails he sent from the passenger seat of the Fiat and the calls he made. One name kept recurring, though, and the name belonged to Dr. Georgia Tremlett.
She wasn’t an Oxbridge don. She was a departmental head at Manchester University. She was Professor of Pan-African Religion and Mythology, which seemed a vast subject area. When Fortescue got through to her, she said she could only see him for 30 minutes the following day and that Wednesday was probably the ideal day that week to schedule some meaningful time for discussion. When he mentioned the Horan journal and referenced Shaddeh’s name, she said that she’d have to call him back. She did so after 10 minutes, saying she’d shuffled her schedule around and that she could now offer him the whole of the following afternoon.
At Keele Services on the M6, where they’d stopped for a break, they sat at an outside table where Fortescue sipped coffee and Ruthie smoked and read Georgia Tremlett’s Wikipedia entry.
‘She started out as an anthropologist. That was the subject of her first degree.’
‘How many has she taken?’
‘She’s a year younger than me and obscenely well qualified.’
The Colony Trilogy Page 56