‘I’ll bet she can’t drive like you,’ Fortescue said, after a pause.
‘Careful,’ Ruthie said. ‘If you were driving, we’d still be the wrong side of Birmingham.’
‘You reached warp speed on the M6 toll.’
‘No cameras on the toll road.’
‘It’s convenient my picking up the journal in Liverpool and her being based only 30 miles away. It’s ideal.’
‘Maybe it’s fate,’ Ruthie said, wishing she hadn’t said it even before the words had left her mouth. She exhaled smoke and stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray with unnecessary force, thinking that sometimes, most of the time probably, she was a complete idiot. Just mentioning fate was tempting it and she wanted nothing bad to happen to the man she was with. She sometimes dreaded that.
They were in Southport by 4pm, just before dusk. After dumping their bags in their room, they walked along the still-handsome tree-lined boulevard that was Lord Street until they reached Nevill Street, where they turned left to head for the promenade and the pier.
She’d been right, Fortescue thought, it was romantic. The sun had broken through the clouds and Southport had a huge sky and an orange ambience bathed them as they walked the length of the pier to the arcade full of antique amusement machines at its end. They were holding hands and Ruthie walked swinging their arms with happiness and wearing a slight, secretive smile. The last rays of the descending sun gave her heavy black hair a silken shimmer and darkened her lips in a way that made kissing her an urgent need in him.
He stopped and pulled her towards him and did kiss her. The kiss broke. He shaded her from the sun like that and her face was pale and her eyes black in his cast shadow. ‘I love you,’ he said.
She smiled. ‘You’d better,’ she said.
They played on the machines with old-fashioned pennies. They put a penny in the slot to hear and watch the Laughing Sailor gyrate and roar with clockwork mirth in his mottled blues. They lowered crane booms with little levers to win liquorice and lollipops. They pinged away at tin targets with pistols firing corks.
Fortescue figured most of the machines were Edwardian. They’d evidently been very keen on having their futures foretold back then. There was a machine on which you placed your hand on a dense rectangle of tiny retractable metal rods to have your palm read. There was another, which printed out your horoscope and a third that predicted your future in answer to some push button questions about your character.
It was destiny quaintly mechanized, but neither Phil nor Ruthie squandered their coinage on these particular attractions. Perhaps they were both thinking about what had been said and regretted earlier at the more mundane and modern-day location of Keele Services on the motorway. He thought that was probably the case.
He could joke about making himself a hostage to fortune by agreeing to be her passenger with Ruthie at the wheel of a muscular car. But fate had so far seemed to play a rudely intrusive part in his life and he thought he might learn things the following day that would propel him powerfully once again on a path not really of his choosing.
He remembered the first time he’d met Ruthie, outside a pub at Portsmouth Harbour overlooking the Solent sea forts. That too had been at dusk. He’d been surprised at how beautiful she was, something that happened to him constantly, a surge of grateful pleasure running through him whenever he laid eyes on her, wherever they happened to be, whatever they happened to be engaged in doing.
Had it not been for his involvement with New Hope Island, he’d never have met her at all. He remembered what he’d said to her then when he’d said he didn’t think the island had finished with him and thought it had only just started with her.
They walked back towards the Vincent from the pier, eating unseasonal ice-cream cornets, Ruthie doing that arm-swinging thing she did whenever they held hands, smiling whenever her white-tipped tongue retreated back between her teeth.
He was glad he’d agreed to this little impromptu jaunt. They earned enough combined to be able to afford the odd treat. He was even gladder he’d told her he loved her. It was only the truth. There was no finality about that declaration and nothing fatalistic. It felt like the beginning much more than it did the end of something. He hoped with all his heart they’d be given the time for that adventure together. He wasn’t complacent that they would, he wasn’t even very confident, in truth. But he knew despite this, that he’d never felt a happier or more fortunate man in his life than at that moment.
She’d finished her ice cream. She said, ‘I suppose you know Southport quite well.’
‘I used to come here on the train with my brother in the summers as a kid. There was a huge open-air bathing pool, an art deco masterpiece built in the 1920s. It’s gone now. It’s a multiplex and a Nandos and a bowling alley and their car park.’
‘There must be other stuff work seeing.’
‘The Atkinson museum and art gallery’s a fantastic place. Why?’
‘I’ll do some writing while you’re gone in the morning and then some exploring in the afternoon. I think we should stay another night, drive back on Tuesday morning.’
‘That’s a very practical suggestion.’
‘I’m a very practical woman.’
Chapter Five
Baxter’s suggestion that Helena Davenport play guinea pig at the resort complex she’d designed had been as much of a dare as a serious request. She could easily have laughed it off as a joke. She’d done it because she was a bit of a perfectionist. Most architects signed off their building projects before the tiresome problems could begin with cladding or condensation, with water penetration or troublesome acoustics or temperature variables caused by sunlight encountering windows made from the wrong kind of glass positioned at angles not properly considered.
She’d worked extremely hard on the New Hope project, the chief creative on the job because the challenges had made it too risky a commission to delegate. If something went wrong on completion, she felt it only fair that the buck stop personally with her. She trusted to her talent for innovation and despite her little narcotic problem, she was generally extremely thorough when it came to the detail.
Now there was talk in the profession of awards short-lists. She was vain and competitive enough to want her practice to win these. She thought it would be good too for the morale of her staff, for Edinburgh and for Scotland for Davenport Associates to be accorded international recognition. High-profile women architects were still a bit of a novelty and it would help champion that cause. It wouldn’t do the New Hope Experience any harm either.
It was late Sunday afternoon and she’d hitched a ride on the back of Derek Johnson’s quad bike. His people had their camp at the opposite end of the Island from the complex, just inland from where upper-crust crofter David Shanks had built his cottage in the 1930s and seeing it remained on her New Hope to do list.
She’d already toured Seamus Ballantyne’s colony settlement, roughly at the island’s centre, trespassing on what was now a World Heritage Site aware that his community had vanished abruptly and without trace. She’d been aware also of a rumour that in response to some earlier crisis afflicting his Kingdom of Belief, he’d indulged in human sacrifice. He would have come across that practice on a genocidal scale while bartering for slaves among the warring tribes of West Africa.
She’d got on okay with Johnson the previous night, on the whole. He’d cracked a beer and improvised a supper for himself of pretzels and nachos and pistachio nuts and they’d watched 300 together while he consumed roughly a year’s recommended salt intake. The movies were stored along with music files on a high-end server in her suite’s entertainment system and were at least the quality of Blu-Ray on the screen. When 300 had finished, she felt relaxed enough to mention the moment when she’d felt like the woman at the hotel in The Shining as he’d hammered at the complex door.
It transpired that Johnson was a horror fan. He told her The Shining had originally been a novel written at the end of the 1970s by
Stephen King. He said there was a big screen version vastly superior to the TV movie she’d watched and they should see if it was among the stored files. When she did a search, there were three films on the server directed by Stanley Kubrick and so they watched that together too. Afterwards, Helena rather wished she’d sat through Barry Lyndon or Dr. Strangelove instead.
She hitched her ride on Sunday afternoon partly to get away from the complex. She was leaving the following day and knew she wouldn’t be alone there that night because of Baxter’s instructions to her burly companion. But the weirdness of the cracked picture window grew stranger every time she looked at it and though she knew it had to be imagined, she thought there was a poised stillness about her suite that posed some impending threat too subtle to identify.
Get a grip, woman, it’s not the Overlook Hotel, she told herself. But when she suggested their trip to the other side of the island to her horror-loving chaperone, he seemed as relieved as she was to get away for a while from where they were.
He took a spare helmet from the cargo case mounted on the back of the bike and gave it to her, looking round, his eyes narrowing as he viewed the heights above them.
She said, ‘What?’
‘Kind of lulls you, all those beguiling place-names the chief’s given the Island’s beauty spots.’
‘It’s a beautiful place,’ she said. The mild weather was holding. The sky was a spectacular blue, just remote, faint smudges of cloud.
‘Eighteen months ago, some people came here on a writers’ retreat and none of them ever made it home again. Some of the survivors of the 2010 expedition came to try to find out what had happened to them and half of them never made it back either.’
‘Why do you call them survivors?’
‘It was kept quiet, but there was a high body count on the expedition in ’10. You must have heard something?’
‘I was working in New York back then, at a practice based in Manhattan. Hadn’t yet come back and set up on my own.’
‘A well-known archeologist and cosmologist never came back. Neither did a Jesuit exorcist on the trip.’
‘Jesus. They brought an exorcist?’
‘They were covering all the bases.’
‘And he what? Disappeared?’
‘All I know is he never made it back,’ Johnson said.
‘And in the 1820s, an entire community vanished,’ she said. ‘There were said to be around 150 of them.’
‘And now Cody,’ Johnson said. He looked directly at Helena. He said, ‘I can think of places I’d rather spend my holidays.’
She put on her helmet. She smiled at him. She said, ‘Take me to the Shanks cottage. I’m told it’s very picturesque.’
It stood pale and benign above the tide line. It occupied a small granite plateau above the pebbles and then the white sand that stretched to the surf. It looked unblemished by time, but she knew it had been ruined and then restored; sympathetically restored, as the vernacular of property sales would have it. Outside it was spotlessly neat and seemed ready for occupation, inviting, were it not sited at so lonely a spot.
‘David Shanks must have been desperate to escape something,’ she said.
Johnson only shrugged. He said, ‘I don’t know much about him. He came from a posh background and he was decorated in the ’14-18 war. Maybe he was trying to escape the Great Depression, it was that period when he turfed up here.’
Helena nodded. She’d known about the posh and medal bits, but that was all.
‘The chief keeps talking Shanks up, saying that he was a George Orwell type, a significant figure in bohemian literature in the inter-war years.’
‘Is that a direct quote?’
‘It’s word for word. All I know about Orwell is from having to read Animal Farm as a set book at school.'
‘It’s to Felix Baxter’s advantage, New Hope having a literary pedigree.’
‘He doesn’t miss a trick.’
‘I’m going inside.’
Inside was a stripped metal cot, a plain table, a Welsh Dresser and two shelves full of books. Lighting was a couple of hurricane lamps depending from hooks screwed into the ceiling joists and neither looked like they’d been lit for months. There was something emphatically cold about the interior of the cottage; not just abandonment but a feral chill that made her want to get out again urgently into the air and the brightness. She had the mad instinct that someone or something had squatted there, baleful and watchful and then afterwards stolen away.
Johnson took her to their camp. The buildings were composed of some tough performance fabric stretched tautly over frames made from high-tensile steel struts. They didn’t look permanent, but they looked as resilient as the island’s unpredictable weather meant they needed to be.
They prepared a meal and she ate with them. It was lamb stew and she couldn’t honestly remember eating anything tastier or more succulent for ages. She imagined their food was all thawed from frozen ingredients, as hers had been in her short time on the island. They were better at preparing their dishes than she was. They’d had longer to practice, but she’d never have made up the gap, she admitted to herself, complimenting them as they clustered around her, men deprived of female company for too long in their tedious New Hope tours of civilian duty. She didn’t mention Greg Cody but sensed he was there, at their shared table, in all their thoughts.
Before leaving with Johnson to head back for the complex, she asked to see their transmitter. She’d been sent an invoice in error that had shown her back at her Edinburgh office what the kit had cost. Baxter Enterprises had squandered £20, 000 on communications hardware that was apparently mostly useless.
‘What worries me when the Experience opens up for business,’ she said to Johnson, ‘is what happens if there’s a kayak emergency or a badly cut child or someone with a ruptured appendix and no contact with Stornoway or the mainland.’
‘Get the kit aboard an R.I. and 800 metres offshore and even battery-powered, the signal’s not only strong but crystal clear,’ he said.
‘And if the emergency occurs during a bad storm?’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘Fair point,’ he said.
‘Switch it on.’
‘Your funeral,’ he said.
He flicked a switch on the big console and various lights lit softly and there was a hum of power surge and the voltage regulator kicked in and the kit became quiet again. Johnson took a breath and leant over the machinery and twisted a dial and very faintly, in a mournful drone, a melody insinuated a strained aural path from nowhere that sounded remotely human.
‘Sometimes it sounds like a child,’ he said, ‘distressed and wanting company. I’d swear it’s an actual tune.’
It was a tune. Folk was Helena’s thing in the same way horror was Johnson’s. He loved Stephen King. She was a huge fan of Karine Polwart and Lisa Knapp. But this wasn’t either of them. This was a Kate Rusby song. As faint and distorted as it sounded, it was The Recruited Collier.
Around them, a gust of wind blasted against the sides of the comms room with sufficient force to make the fabric ripple and shudder and the steel struts squeal in protest. Sudden rain spattered heavily against the roof above them.
‘We’d better get you back,’ Johnson said, ‘If the weather’s about to turn, we don’t either of us want to be caught out in it.’
‘Is it turning?’
He grinned. ‘This is the Outer Hebrides, he said. ‘And it’s January. Put your cagoule on and then hold tight, Helena. You’re in for a rough ride.’
She swallowed. She couldn’t help wondering how rough. The New Hope Experience complex had been the biggest challenge of her professional life. She was beginning to wonder if it might also be her biggest miscalculation.
Fortescue was at the staff entrance to the museum at 9am on Monday morning. He’d worked there as Keeper of Artefacts for a full decade before resigning after the New Hope expedition and still sat on its governing board. He was a familiar face and no one challenged
him or questioned his right of entry.
He went and fetched the Horan journal from the very spot on the library archive shelf where he’d originally left it and then went to the cloakroom and opened the locker he still kept there in lieu of a desk and took out a bunch of keys.
He hadn’t intended to do this. He’d intended only to recover the journal and then to be on his way to Manchester with the hand-written and cloth-bound account of Horan’s last voyage aboard the Andromeda resting innocently on the passenger seat of the Fiat beside him as he drove.
An early Victorian building housed the museum and those parts the visitors saw had been sympathetically modernized and made spaciously inviting and interactive. But behind its public face, parts of the building were dark and cramped and labyrinthine, something he was forcefully reminded of descending two narrow, veined sets of marble steps to the room at the end of a low corridor itself narrowed by iron pipes from the period when technology hadn’t yet permitted plumbing to be discreet.
He found the key he was looking for on the ring and singled it out and gripped its bow between forefinger and thumb, thinking that there’d been a time when what he was about to do would only have been done under duress and would have provoked in him a sick sensation of sweating dread. This was because the room he was about to enter contained Seamus Ballantyne’s sea chest.
Inside the chest were Ballantyne’s boots and boat cloak and a ceremonial sword of rank and a cutlass for those occasions when a sword wasn’t ceremonial but a weapon at sea at the turbulent conclusion of the 18th century. There was a hoard of naval charts rolled and secured by a faded black ribbon. More sinister, at the bottom of the trunk, he knew there were two tribal bracelets made of human teeth, incisors drilled through and strung on fine silver chains, their tiny links exquisitely worked. He couldn’t see either of them without rummaging. But that was fine because he thought them safer out of sight.
Most valuably of course there was Ballantyne’s watch, a beautiful timepiece of great intricacy and astounding accuracy; the type of instrument which all ship’s captains had coveted back then for the role they played in the precise navigation of any voyage. They were highly prized, but he’d been able to afford it comfortably. The slave trade had been a hugely profitable enterprise.
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