Elizabeth’s arm jerked. For a stretched-out moment of cold revulsion, Ruthie thought she might be about to reach out a hand to cover hers in an act of sisterly solidarity that would scrape dead skin over flesh still warm and living. But that obscene contradiction didn’t occur.
‘He can’t endure the ordeal he plans alone,’ the spectre said. ‘I tried that and it drove me to despair and eventually self-murder. He listens with you, or you might well lose him to it. Now go, Ruthie, so I can spare you the sight of my departure.’
Ruthie Gillespie walked out of the pub. She did so leaving half a glass of wine un-drunk and a lunch paid for and not yet served. She’d lost her appetite, not to shock, but to a smell still haunting her nostrils.
She’d turned right without conscious thought. She’d walk across Lord Street on up to the Marine Lake and smoke a cigarette and then find a bar, any bar, and order something strong to drink. The odour had been faint. But it had been persistently there and it had not been at all a scent you’d confuse with the smell of the living.
Helena Davenport said, ‘So you’re not actually on Baxter’s payroll?’
‘No,’ Johnson said.
‘That seems a bit odd when he runs a security firm of his own.’
‘They’re bouncers, they do doors. This is more specialized. I’m ex-Met police and my blokes are all ex-police or ex-army. There’s a level of expertise and fitness required and some knowledge about survival and emergency protocols. What I didn’t know already, I’ve learned. It’s a bit different from wearing a black bomber jacket and buzz-cut hair and saying you’re not welcome at the disco in those trainers.’
‘But you didn’t have the expertise required to save Greg Cody.’
‘Apparently not.’
‘Why did you take the job?’
‘There’s a Met Commander back at New Scotland Yard, bloke named Lassiter. He’s a bit of a legend, to be honest. He was on the New Hope expedition in ’10 and he came back here eighteen months ago when a writers’ retreat came to grief on the island. His wife came with him and was killed with a couple of other people by a freak wave.’
‘Jesus.’
‘When this gig came up, I called Commander Lassiter. I’d met him once at a lecture he’d given a bunch of promising junior officers. He remembered me, which was flattering but probably characteristic. He told me the island was a hazardous and intrinsically hostile place.’
‘And that wasn’t enough to put you off?’
‘It was meant to, Helena, there’s no doubt about that. But all it actually did was intrigue me further. This was a minimum year duration contract. The pay is good and the benefits generous. Felix Baxter seems to believe that you pay peanuts and you get monkeys. He didn’t want monkeys here. He wanted vigilant professionals on the job. He very much wants this project to succeed, is my feeling. I was grateful for the Commander’s warning but chose to ignore his advice, as I’m sure he knew I would.’
‘He didn’t know you that well.’
‘He’s the sort doesn’t need to read body language or look into your eyes. He can intuit just through the tone of your voice.’
Helena said, ‘If you’d have been the sort of man to accept his advice, you’d never have left the Met in the first place.’
‘That’s exactly right. I resigned because I couldn’t stomach a level of accountability that means you have to practically fill in a form if you want to take a crap. The bureaucracy of modern policing’s just unbelievable. So I quit and now I’m doing this instead.’
‘And you’re your own boss.’
‘In charge of everything,’ he said, ‘except the weather, and Greg Cody’s whereabouts and you. I’m not in charge of you, obviously.’
They were in the sitting room of her suite. The lights were on. Outside it was gloomy and wet, scudding clouds, wind in withering gusts scouring the exterior of the complex. She thought that even with its partial crack, her picture window retained sufficient integrity and strength to resist the elements. She was anxious to get it replaced, but that was more of an aesthetic than a practical priority. She’d already asked Johnson how long the storm was likely to last and he’d just shrugged and said there was no real way of telling.
There were two plus points to her extended stay on New Hope. Every hour she spent in its granite isolation increased her resolve to put the coke habit and the toy boy behind her. The island wasn’t exactly party central. She’d be put in the way of narcotic temptation as soon as she got back to Edinburgh.
Professionally, she was doing fine. Personally, she was aimless with damaged esteem and the damage had been wholly self-inflicted. It was long past time to get a grip. She said, ‘Meeting someone as intuitive as your Commander Lassiter must be a bit intimidating, like stepping into an x-ray machine.’
‘It isn’t, really. He’s a recovering alcoholic and makes no secret of the fact. He doesn’t suffer fools, but there’s no arrogance about him. You’d like him, if you ever got to meet.’
Thankfully, we won’t, she thought, because he’d see right through me. Instead, she said, ‘Good looking?’
Johnson pondered on this. He said, ‘Yeah, I suppose, in a lean, tough, weathered sort of way.’ He grinned. ‘Plus he’s single.’
Their conversation had taken a fanciful sort of turn. What else did you do? She should have been back on the mainland by now but nothing was going to fly in this weather and the swell was too severe for any boat to come and get her off. She couldn’t even contact the office by email or phone. Even amid all that seductive five-star New Age luxury, with the freezer full and under-floor heating on, she was aware of the island’s remoteness and isolation and the capricious limits it imposed on free will.
To Johnson, she said, ‘What do you know about Seamus Ballantyne’s Colony?’
Johnson, burly handful that he was, shivered slightly. He said, ‘He called it his Kingdom of Belief, but their faith didn’t save them. All of them vanished.’ Then he said, ‘If you’ve no objection, Helena, I think I’ll do a session in the gym.’
‘You’ve got your kit?’
‘It’s in the box on the back of the quad bike.’
‘Be my guest,’ she said. ‘I might even join you.’ She looked at her wristwatch. It was four in the afternoon and getting gloomier outside, dusk-like. The truth was that she really didn’t want to be by herself. She was quite seriously spooked and rather dreading the night to come. It would be an ordeal. She kept telling herself she’d been unnerved by watching The Shining two nights previously. But it wasn’t that, she knew. It was this place.
‘You’ve got family, haven’t you, Derek?’
‘I’ve a wife and two young boys, three and five.’
‘You must miss them.’
‘Every minute of every day, but it’s for my family I’m doing this.’ He stood and stretched and the bones of his big frame cracked audibly. He said, ’Ninety minutes of lifting heavy metal and then I’ll rustle us up some dinner, crack a beer, open a bottle of vino for you, make the popcorn.’
‘Really, popcorn?’
‘Tonight’s double-bill is Notting Hill and Pretty Woman. We’re having a feel-good evening.’
She smiled. She thought that left to his own devices, he’d probably be looking forward to a filmic zombie-fest or a Wes Craven triple-bill. Except that Johnson’s Commander Lassiter wasn’t the only intuitive man on the planet.
Phil had taken Ruthie to a swanky, brightly-lit pub called The Imperial. It was a world away from the deliberate, authentic gloom of the Guest House. She didn’t think she’d see Elizabeth Burrows here. In the glare of the fierce ornamental bulbs above them she’d look as lifeless and bedraggled as a scarecrow.
I’m not proud of my dishevelment. I was stylish in life.
She’d confronted him straight away, the moment he walked into the Atkinson, waiting for him just inside the main door, pouncing because secrets were lies and lies were a betrayal she simply wouldn’t tolerate.
He told
her there about what Doctor Tremlett had told him about the hazards present on New Hope, the mythology and the mythic creature’s potent, enduring antipathy to man. And she told him about her lunchtime encounter with a threadbare revenant only present to issue a warning.
‘You’ll tell me what you’ve been up to Phil, or it’s the end of us.’
‘I’ll tell you everything,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you tonight, over a drink.’
‘You’ve need of Dutch courage?’
‘I’m nowhere near as brave as you seem to think.’
‘You’re too fucking brave for your own good, that’s a big part of our problem.’
He looked crestfallen, at that. He said, ‘You really think we’ve a problem?’
‘Yeah, we have, I found out today. And we solve it today or it’s over between us.’
At a table at the Imperial he said, ‘She was a student. Only two people requested access to Ballantyne’s sea chest in the whole of the 20th century. David Shanks was the first of them and Elizabeth Burrows was the second.
‘She was a postgrad student back at the end of the 1960’s at Liverpool University. She was doing a Politics and Philosophy PhD. She was a feminist and a huge fan of the feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft.’
‘She was reading Frankenstein, when I saw her, or she was pretending to. Wasn’t Mary Shelley Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter?’
Fortescue nodded. He said, ‘She was reading that when Patsy Lassiter saw her.’
‘Jesus,’ Ruthie said. ‘Patsy’s seen her too?’
‘On the day I first met him seven years ago. Patsy came to the museum in the run up to the New Hope expedition. He was still an ex-copper back then, doing background prior to the expedition itself, working on a retainer, still drinking. The contents of the chest gave him a start and he went to the pub afterwards for a stiffener and saw Lizzie Burrows and she spoke to him. He got enough clues when he thought about it to place her time-wise. He had an old police colleague on the Merseyside Force. He was able to find out from him about the original investigation into Elizabeth’s death.’
‘Go on.’
‘Elizabeth Burrows was doing her thesis on Rebecca Browning, who was Seamus Ballantyne’s estranged wife. Apparently Rebecca was some sort of proto-feminist pin-up, at least to Elizabeth. She gained access to the sea chest, legitimately. But she stole something and the theft led to her downfall.’
‘She committed suicide,’ Ruthie said. ‘She told me so herself.’
‘Do you never regret your Goth tendencies?’
‘I can’t help my hair colour. Black clothes are slimming to wear. My complexion is naturally pale. The last time I drank cider at night in a graveyard I was 17. That’s half a lifetime ago for me.’
‘That graveyard night, were you listening to The Cure?’
‘You’re not out of the woods, Phil, and jokes won’t get you there. Get on with the story or I’ll make you a very unhappy man.’
Elizabeth had stolen a bracelet of human teeth. The Horan journal later informed Fortescue that this was one of two such bracelets found with Shaddeh when the Albacheians had discovered him on a river bank as no more than an infant child. The teeth were drilled-through and all incisors. Ballantyne had taken them from his defiant captive slave and stored then away and apparently forgotten about them years before his harbour-side epiphany and his leaving of his native Liverpool for the island he would christen New Hope.
‘Why the fuck would anyone steal a bracelet made of human teeth?’
‘Your language isn’t pretty tonight.’
‘Elizabeth Burrows wasn’t pretty in the Guest House, so fucking well answer the question, Phil.’
‘She told me that herself the last time I ever saw her. I’d see her from time to time, in cafes and bars, pretending to read her old paperback with the faded cover and the suntan oil stains from beach reading. Then the last time she appeared was at my flat and she told me she’d stolen the bracelet on a whim. She couldn’t understand why she’d done it. Had it been a riding crop or broach or hair ribbon, some keepsake to do with Rebecca Browning, she’d have known why she’d stolen it. But it wasn’t and she didn’t.’
‘What happened?’
‘The teeth bracelet was innocent in the daytime. But at night it formed the shape of a mouth and spoke to her. It told her secrets she found it intolerable to hear and know. In the end, she hanged herself.’
‘The poor woman.’
‘Patsy reckoned she’d have suspected she was going mad, a candidate for sectioning and a straightjacket and a rubber clamp to stop her biting off her own tongue in a fit. He figured her too proud and independent to tolerate that happening to her and so she took her own life.’
‘And the object that did for her?’
‘Recovered from the desk in her college room and returned in time to the museum.’
‘And now you’ve got one of the bracelets, because you want to hear what that mouth has to say. But you had no intention of telling me you’d taken it.’
‘I wanted to spare you the experience. I’m telling you now.’
‘Elizabeth told me it could be disastrous for you to listen to it on your own.’
‘Well, she should know. Nice of her to care, I suppose.’
‘How did you know which of the bracelets to take?’
‘I don’t think it matters. They’re identical. The idea occurred to me listening to Georgia Tremlett. She called Shaddeh the greatest African magician of the modern age. She doesn’t necessarily believe in magic. I’ve been given ample reason to do so. I think it was Shaddeh’s voice that Elizabeth heard. If he’s as regretful as I think he is about what he set in motion on New Hope, he’ll speak to us.’
‘So it’s us, now? I’m invited to join you in the posh seats?’
‘Please don’t be angry.’
‘You get one let off with me Professor Fortescue and that was it. I‘ll forgive and forget, but don’t ever try and deceive me again. Where’s the bracelet now?’
‘It’s in the boot of my car. I’m not spoiling our little holiday by risking anything like that tonight.’
‘He’s been dead for 200 years.’
‘Elizabeth Burrows has been dead for 50.’
‘She doesn’t look too fresh.’
‘But you take my point.’
‘It was actually rather a clever thought, not the not telling me bit, that was exceptionally dumb, but the basic idea. It’s going to be bloody sinister to sit through if it works.’
‘Would you be happy to have it happen at your cottage?’
‘Happy is the wrong word. Where did Elizabeth hear it?’
‘It spoke in her college room, in a hall of residence in Liverpool.’
‘If anything peculiar had happened in that room after her death, it would have been an adjunct to the police report, wouldn’t it?’
‘Yes, it would. Patsy said the investigation was thorough.’
Ruthie thought about this, about hearing the bracelet speak within her own four walls. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but it seemed reasonably safe.
‘It bit me once.’
‘It did what?’
‘I was overcome by fear, inventorying the contents of the chest. I tried to butch it out. I dared myself to put on one of the bracelets. It was pure bravado and then the teeth closed around my wrist.’
‘That must’ve been terrifying.’
‘It was, at the time. In retrospect, I think it was just Shaddeh having a bit of fun. I think he was just teasing me. The skin wasn’t broken. No blood was drawn.’
‘So you’d do it again?’
‘What do you think?’
She leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth. His penance was paid, his period of hard labour over. There were arcane rules about kissing in pubs; but looking around her, at the scouse-brows and heavy make-up and micro-skirts of most of the Imperial’s female clientele, she thought hers a forgivable crime.
‘Is there a decent Indian in South
port?’
‘There’s bound to be,’ he said.
‘Let’s find it,’ Ruthie said. ‘I’m suffocating in perfume and aftershave in here and I could murder a curry.’ She took a last look around, standing. She said, ‘I can’t understand why you brought me here, it’s not my sort of place at all.’
He said, ‘You were angry. This place is always heaving. I needed witnesses, in case things got physical.’
‘You’re forgiven,’ she said, ‘so things could get physical later. But I‘ve got to eat first or I’m likely to faint’
They watched Pretty Woman first on the toss of a coin. They’d got halfway through Notting Hill and were down to the scrapings of the popcorn Johnson had made when the screen went off and simultaneously, the lights all went out.
‘Power cut,’ Johnson said, redundantly.
It wasn’t pitch-dark. They’d turned down the lights anyway to brighten the image on the widescreen TV they were watching. There was enough ambient light from the rainy sky outside to be able to avoid bumping into pieces of furniture. It was the locks Helena was concerned about. They were electronically powered and she thought with the power out the locks on the main entrance would probably have released. They did that for safety reasons that had her now feeling anything but secure. It was a fail-safe to prevent people from feeling trapped. Except that trapped was exactly how she felt.
They’d had the volume of the movie cranked up high. The sudden silence wasn’t silent at all. Sounds they had been drowning out swelled and murmured. Wind ululated, given a voice by the contours of the complex she’d designed, moaning and shrieking with fluctuating force, whipping and hurling rain audibly against the windows of her suite.
Everything was dulled to monochrome. Helena inventoried their debris; the empty crisp and tortilla chip bags and the drained beer cans and half empty bottle of Merlot and the wine glass beside it and the bowl they’d improvised as a popcorn bucket and they were the vestiges of a little kingdom, stray symbols of the siege mentality their shared insecurities about the island had forced upon them. She felt a frigid blast of salt-air and knew with certainty that their defences had been breached. The front entrance was ajar, its hi-tech locks defunct.
The Colony Trilogy Page 59