‘Can’t be a power outage,’ she said. ‘We’re using a tiny fraction of the gen’s capacity.’
‘Teething problem,’ Johnson said. ‘Isn’t that why Baxter invited you to come?’
‘I suppose one of the reasons.’
‘Unless it’s someone playing silly buggers,’ Johnson said.
Someone or something, Helena thought, remembering the abrupt eclipse in the room they were in now, in afternoon sunlight, the shudder of something strong and substantial colliding with toughened glass forcefully enough to inflict a crack she had growing doubts about. Would the window hold? Physics told her it would. But the laws of physics were proving less than immutable on New Hope Island.
‘I’m no engineer,’ she said, ‘but I can get the power back on. Even if I can’t locate and fix the fault, I can switch over to our back-up generator. It’s tested and fully fuelled. It’s not a complicated job.’
Johnson nodded. There was another cold gust of Atlantic air and somewhere not far away a door slammed with a sudden loud thump that made both of them jump.
‘I’ll get my jacket,’ Johnson said.
‘I’m glad you’re here, Derek.’
‘It’s my job,’ he said, she thought matching her for understatement.
She shivered. The air coming in through the open doors had scoured out their man-made warmth with surprising speed. It was January, it was the Hebrides and around them, a winter storm raged.
She walked carefully into her bedroom and took a sweater from a drawer and put it on. She located gloves and a scarf and her rainproof parka. She was lacing on her hiking boots when she thought there some subtle shift in the sound of the gale outside, now insinuating its path through empty galleries and corridors, through the lift shaft and other pockets of more artful space she’d created. Just for a moment, it seemed to croon out a melody. Wind sang a brief snatch of, The Recruited Collier. But she knew that was just her fraught imagination playing impish tricks on someone thoroughly scared.
Chapter Seven
The main entrance was open, when they got to it, battening back and forth on its hinges, a quarter of a ton of steel and the sustainably sourced wood covering it, flapping, toyed with by surging, elemental force. Rain puddled inside the complex foyer making the teak floor slippery between coconut mats meant to give the lobby an informal, Robinson Crusoe feel. They’d been the idea of an interior decorator briefed to conjure a period mood of island paradise.
Now they were damp and ridiculous and would reek stagnantly of salt when they dried out, if ever they did dry out, if ever the storm eased and ended, Helena thought. The island wasn’t paradise. It was anarchic and delinquent and it was her cruel and hostile prison too. The thought came to her in the gloom of the foyer that she was being punished for what she’d done here. And she wondered, dry mouthed, whether her crime against New Hope would prove to be a capital offence.
Johnson reached for her upper arm and shook her bodily. He said, ‘Stay in the moment, Helena. There’s no real reason to be afraid.’
‘Then why are you whispering?’
‘Just take everything one step at a time.’
‘Okay,’ she said, nodding, thinking that he was talking to himself in saying this as much as he was to her. It wasn’t that fear and panic were contagious, so much as that the place they were in provoked those responses so strongly. For the first time, she wondered seriously were there ghosts here.
They got outside. The air was a harsh, stinging assault of rain and spindrift. The sea itself was a dark turmoil of surging water topped by ragged spumes of white. Gusting wind howled outside and careened around and buffeted them and Helena led the way as quickly as she was able along it’s façade and left flank aiming for the rear of the complex and the route underground to the bunker housing their twin generators.
Access was via a grey metal hatch coloured and contoured to match the granite around it. If you didn’t know it was there, you were unlikely to spot and be offended by this heavily industrial artefact. The idea, Baxter’s idea, was that nothing jarred or spoiled the mood. The generators were literally the dirty secret hidden behind and below his Arcadian retreat.
A hex key opened the hatch and Helena had the one that matched the hexagonal slot precisely on her key ring. She opened the hatch, struggling against the wind, both of them together lifting and dropping it back flat against the rock, staring down into blackness she knew concealed a flight of metal steps.
She hadn’t brought a torch.
But Johnson had. He played the beam and they climbed down to an eerie stillness and quiet, everything monochromatic in the torch beam, the gouged vault given the dimensions, as light played on the walls surrounding them, of an epic tomb.
There was a snicker of sound and then a throaty gurgle and generator 1 kicked suddenly, powerfully back into life. Johnson played the torch beam over its housing. The lights above them in metal brackets in twin rows glimmered and then strengthened and glowed. He switched the torch beam off and Helena checked the gauges mounted on the generator’s console. She checked temperature and fan strength and pressure and fuel levels. Everything was as it should have been.
‘Glitchy,’ Johnson said.
Helena shook her head. She’d have to shout for him to hear her over the noise down there now. She said, ‘These things are ridiculously over-engineered. They don’t just stop and start spontaneously.’
‘The ghost in the machine,’ Johnson said, smiling.
It was the title of a book by Arthur Koestler. It was also the title of an album by The Police, which Helena thought Johnson much more likely referencing. Either way, it proved she wasn’t the only one with phantoms on her mind. She looked up to the open hatch, rain drizzling through it onto the top-most steps, fearful that it would suddenly shut with a clang, trapping them, their having been deliberately lured there.
But that didn’t happen. She had one more thorough look at the working generator and then they climbed up and out, into weather she hoped she wasn’t deceiving herself was becoming slightly less severe than it had seemed when the lights went out.
They secured all the doors. Johnson found a mop and bucket and mopped water from the lobby floor. By the time they got back to her suite, the wind wasn’t quite the incessant howl it had been when the film had stopped and they’d first become properly aware of it. She examined the crack in the picture window and was relieved to see it hadn’t worsened. By now it was 1am and Helena was more than ready for bed and sleep.
She was in her bathroom, had actually applied a smudge of toothpaste to the bristles of her toothbrush when she looked into the sink and saw something sitting there.
It was a single tooth, the enamel slightly yellow against the white of the bowl. There was a brownish circle of gum around the root. The tooth was an incisor and the gum, now Helena had seen it there, gave off a whiff of decomposition like the taint of spoiled meat that caused her to gag, because the tooth was human and had been ripped out forcefully and could only have been put there deliberately for her to find.
Edie Chambers got the call from Felix Baxter’s office at 11am on Tuesday morning, at almost exactly the moment the boat appeared on the horizon of a calm sea to collect a relieved Helena Davenport from the cobbled quay that passed for a dock when the weather allowed on New Hope Island.
It wasn’t from Baxter personally, obviously. But it was to confirm that their preliminary interview would take place on Thursday at Baxter’s London offices at noon.
‘Preliminary?’
Baxter’s PA had introduced herself as Joy, no surname. ‘Assuming the interview goes well,’ she said, ‘he’ll want you to see what he’s done with the island. We have a stock of excellent pictures of all the major landmarks and exterior and interior shots of the complex and they can be used to illustrate your piece, but Felix will want you to see it all personally before you write about it. That’s just being professional and thorough.’
‘Sounds fantastic,’ Edie said.
>
‘He might want you to talk to his project architect Helena Davenport and maybe to Hugh Mortimer, who’s his resort general manager. That’s to be discussed.’
‘Okay.’ Edie didn’t want to interview Hugh Mortimer. She wanted to write a profile piece on Felix Baxter, maybe with a substantial sidebar on the New Hope Experience. It wasn’t intended as a puff-piece or advertorial for the resort. Though she thought Helena Davenport might be good value and a live subject since she was both Scottish and up for a clutch of awards. Good for a couple of punchy and pertinent quotes, anyway.
She was also interested in discovering if she could what had become of Greg Cody. Baxter had successfully kept that mystery quiet, at least so far. Edie had discovered Cody had a wife, who lived in Epsom. If Patsy was right, what she actually was now was Greg Cody’s widow. Calling her out of the blue would be crass and callous and risk censure from the college. But obtaining a contact number would be straightforward and Edie was curious to know why the woman had not gone public on her husband’s disappearance.
‘Don’t be late on Thursday,’ Joy said. ‘Felix values punctuality. Being late is bad manners and he hates discourtesy.’
‘I’ll be on time,’ Edie said, ‘I wouldn’t dream of turning up late.’
So she was going back to New Hope. Her first and last visit to the island had taken place 18 months earlier when she’d been shadowing the Chronicle reporter Lucy Church; sent there by the late Alexander McIntyre to find out what had happened to the writers’ retreat members who had days earlier vanished from their camp there.
Lucy Church had been her mum’s best friend and to her, Auntie Lucy. Her mum and Auntie Lucy had met and bonded in the run-up to McIntyre’s expedition six years earlier, on which they’d both gone. Now they were both dead. Her mum had died of heart failure three years ago and Auntie Lucy had later perished on New Hope. As had Aunt Lucy’s husband, to Edie, her Uncle Paul.
Now it occurred to her that some or all of this this might be detail known to Felix Baxter. He was such a thorough and calculating man, it was actually inconceivable that he didn’t know about her connection to the island; that her step-father was Phil Fortescue, who was Patrick Lassiter’s best friend; two men who’d been members of the New Hope expedition, where Phil had first met her mum. He would have known when he said yes to her interview request. Or he would have found out checking her credentials soon after. Not personally he wouldn’t, but Joy or someone like Joy would have done it on his behalf.
That’s why he’d granted the interview request. Patsy had been wrong about his ego being indiscriminate. It had nothing to do with his ego and everything to do with finding out first- hand about some of the things that had occurred in the island’s recent history. Nothing was going to stop his project on New Hope and nothing ever would have; but forewarned was forearmed. That had been Baxter’s reasoning in saying yes to her, she was quite suddenly sure of it.
Something she was much less sure about was her own attitude emotionally to returning to New Hope. It had been a fearful place on her last visit, a place of confusion and terror and in the end of crushing loss. It had no happy associations in her mind. Objectively, she was curious, had a born-reporter’s compelling urge to see the changed wrought there for herself. And there was something else, some other feeling that wasn’t quite resignation, when she tried to identify it properly. Edie discovered, in that moment, that she felt fated to go back there.
On Tuesday evening, Fortescue called Patsy Lassiter. He told him what Georgia Tremlett had divulged about Shaddeh’s industrious New Hope magic and then he told him about taking the bracelet from the sea chest in Liverpool and the encounter between Elizabeth Burrows and Ruthie Gillespie in a dimly lit Southport pub. Lassiter had been up close and personal with Ballantyne’s sea chest and endured a cameo from Elizabeth later the same day as a consequence. That was in the period when he’d still been drinking, but evidently, seven years on from the episode, he remembered it well enough.
‘Frankly, mate, you’re an idiot.’
‘That definition works for me on a number of levels. Be more precise, Patsy.’
‘Keeping anything from Ruthie is just stupid. She’s all or nothing and she’s all you’ve got.’
‘I’ve got Edie.’
‘I mean romantically. Second-chances don’t generally come along in the shape of Ruthie Gillespie. Cherish her, or someone else will.’
‘Cheers.’
‘I don’t recommend being single, not at our age, I don’t.’
‘Should I take out my violin, Patsy? I keep it close to hand, just in case.’
‘I happen to have a date Saturday night, you cheeky Scouse chancer.’
‘Let me guess; a Homebase car park, about two hours after closing. Only my opinion, Patsy, but senior serving police officers should steer clear of dogging sites.’
‘Does the name Helena Davenport mean anything to you?’
‘Of course it does. She’s asked you out?’
‘Saturday night, here in London and she’s Edinburgh based, so maybe I should be highly flattered but I’m not, because she wants something and the something is information. She’s been on the island. She was only able to get off it this morning.’
‘My feeling is you’ll barter information. Something happened while she was there, that’s why she’s contacted you.’
‘Another century, at this rate, and you’d make a half-decent probationer. When do you and Ruthie plan to do your bracelet thing?’
‘Not for another couple of days. Ruthie’s really shaken by the Burrows business.’
‘With her there,’ Lassiter said
‘There’s no bringing that poor Cody bloke back, but no one else has disappeared, so there’s no immediate urgency. Have they?’
‘Not to my knowledge, though Ms. Davenport didn’t sound overly-calm on the blower.’
‘The blower, honest to God, Patsy, sometimes you’re right out of The Sweeney.’
‘An observation previously made by the lovely woman in your life, Phil. Don’t you go blowing it with her. You’ll regret it forever.’
‘I know that. Take care, Patsy.’
‘When I’ve got someone to take care of, I’ll be sure to follow your advice. In the meantime, be careful with the teeth, Phil. All teeth ever really do is bite.’
Lassiter was at home, the too big now home he’d shared with his wife Alice until her death on New Hope. He ended the call thinking about the bits he’d left out, the things Helena Davenport had shared with him that he hadn’t just now shared with Phil.
‘I’d like to talk to you, Commander Lassiter, but it needs to be face to face.’
‘I’m assuming Derek Johnson put you onto me.’
‘He’s a nice man, a good man.’
‘Too good to lose, but policing the 21st century way isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.’
‘Will you see me?’
‘What’s your schedule like?’
‘No ties that bind.’
‘That’s an odd way of putting things, Ms. Davenport.’
‘Helena, please, Commander.’
‘Then since this isn’t official business, please call me Patrick.’
‘I’m busy until close of business on Friday. After that I’m completely free. My only pressing social obligations were a coke habit and a toy boy to try to keep in tow and neither of those survived my New Hope experience, which leaves me with a weekend to fill.’
What Lassiter said was, ‘The price of success, Helena, it’s lonely at the top.’ What he thought though was that New Hope for her had clearly been a brutal epiphany. He was intrigued, curious enough to agree to meet her in London early on Saturday evening at his home, where he’d get more out of her because she’d be more relaxed and focused than was likely in a bar or restaurant.
‘I suppose it’s a bit stupid, revealing a drug habit to a very senior cop.’
‘Not one you’ve put behind you.’
‘Your faith is touching
.’
‘I’m a recovering alcoholic, Helena.’
‘I know. Derek Johnson told me.’
‘I look forward to meeting you on Saturday.’
He read her Wikipedia entry, which he didn’t necessarily trust. He did a Google search and read about the involvement of Davenport Associates with Baxter Enterprises and the complex Baxter had commissioned as the centerpiece of his New Hope Experience. He studied pictures of her building. His distrust of the island told him time would make of it an extravagant folly, but there was no denying its aesthetic appeal. It was a masterfully apt construction, cunningly vernacular, cleverly sympathetic to its surroundings.
Lassiter read about the awards for which Helena’s practice had been shortlisted as a consequence of the New Hope build. He reckoned she’d get at least one gong; awards were political and the project had been popular in Hollyrood and Whitehall. They’d backed Baxter’s scheme – Baxter’s dream – with hard cash.
Finally, he did an image search. The euphemism for Helena Davenport‘s physique was big-boned. She had generous shoulders and hips and a cleavage. She had shoulder-length auburn hair and a strong jaw and green eyes. She was far from conventionally beautiful and ‘pretty’ would have trivialized someone so persistently stylish in her dress and fiercely intelligent in her expression. Still, Lassiter thought, she’s pretty easy on the eye.
On Tuesday evening on New Hope, the six-man strong maintenance crew held a barbecue jointly with the three members of the security team not on duty that night. The break in the weather, the pale sunshine and relative warmth and calm were their excuse for a little celebratory meal out in the open instead of skulking in wind-wracked shelters like modern day cavemen.
They wound-up Johnson, who was present, with speculation about his five-star romance holed up at the Experience complex with glamorous high-flyer Helena Davenport. This was lightly done, because he was both a devoted family man and built on a scale that made it seriously bad news if he went and took offence.
The Colony Trilogy Page 60