Parr would boast in the dreams when he wasn’t singing of his closeness to Captain Ballantyne, the martinet commander who’d had him flogged to within an inch of his life. She supposed sailors of the period had been philosophical about punishment. Life before the mast was notoriously hard. At least, this was her reasoning awake. Asleep and dreaming, she was more concerned, and revolted, by Parr’s unwashed stink and grog-soaked breath and the brown tobacco stains on what few teeth he possessed from smoking his ever-present clay pipe.
It was a bright and gentle day for early February. She’d decided to eat her sandwich lunch outside. She didn’t know it, but the location she’d chosen in the college grounds was the same one at which Phil Fortescue had waited and called Patrick Lassiter, whiling away the time it took her to read the Horan journal prior to their talk together in her office. The cluster of benches under the stand of pines tended to be a secluded spot because the bench slats sometimes became tacky with resin from the falling needles and cones. It put people off sitting there. February, though, was an un-sticky month in their life.
She wondered would Professor Fortescue by now have stumbled on the same conclusion she had concerning the Being’s flaw or weakness. She thought probably not. He’d struck her as an intelligent and thoughtful man troubled by a failure properly to control his own destiny. She’d do a little more research, she decided, before telling Fortescue anything. Early the following week would likely be soon enough.
Meeting him had affected her in one very surprising way. It had made her nostalgic for the fieldwork she hadn’t had time to indulge in for years. He’d made her realize that she missed it. Academic eminence brought substantial rewards both to the ego and the bank balance, but learning new things while getting her hands dirty was something the maritime Professor had made her remember fondly and hanker to do again before time and procrastination took their toll and she became hampered in the wild by a Zimmer Frame.
She unscrewed the cup of her coffee flask and poured and put her hot drink steaming in pale wreaths above its rim on the arm of her bench. She unwrapped her sandwiches and the smell of sweet-cured ham and strong cheese on rye bread stung her nostrils and provoked a swell of saliva under her tongue. She was hungry. She bit into a sandwich and began to chew.
Pale in the distance, she noticed a young woman. She was tall and wore her black hair cut with geometric severity and the skin of her face had a white pallror under her hair. From this distance she was dark-eyed, tall in a black coat with a double-row of gilt buttons. She seemed to stare at Georgia for a moment with eyes that at the distance the two women were apart, looked dark enough to be black.
Georgia felt a pang of envy. The pale woman looked very striking. Georgia wasn’t striking, she knew. She had her hair expensively cut and the gym had firmed her figure and a Betty Jackson habit saw to it that she was always stylishly dressed, but she just wasn’t physically a statement sort of woman. That had recently been brought home to her when she’d held her internal debate about asking Philip Fortescue out for a drink. He had a ravaged handsomeness and a rangy muscularity she thought strongly appealing.
Maybe she’d get her opportunity to do that yet. She felt that he’d be intrigued by her fresh insights into the malevolent forces apparently present on New Hope. She thought they gave her every justification for another face-to-face encounter. That would preferably take place somewhere quiet in the evening over a glass of something that would slowly but surely disinhibit them both.
Georgia dropped a brittle shower of rye breadcrumbs into her lap and looked down to brush them away. Mercifully, the spot was too quiet generally to attract a regular pigeon population, so she didn’t worry overmuch about the debris. There was no flying vermin there to have to feel guilty about encouraging. Remembering her smart, still observer, she glanced up again. But when she did so, there was no sign of the striking woman left in sight.
It was Friday evening when Phil Fortescue took the cloth bag containing the bracelet of teeth from the boot of his car. He had deep misgivings about doing what they were about to. When it had been done before, it had eventually cost the person doing it her life. He had reservations about doing it in Ruthie’s cottage, which had been a blessed refuge for him ever since their romance had begun. He’d nearly lost Ruthie over the bracelet. More accurately he’d almost lost her over his decision not to tell her about it, or what it was he was to attempt to try to do with it, or have it do with him present. And now they were going to do that together.
She really didn’t like deceit. That made him curious about her past romantic history. She was 35. It was plenty old enough for the heartbreaking back-story of love and betrayal she might be keeping to herself. She had a right to her privacy, but he was intrigued by the past generally and because he loved her, tantalized by hers.
Almost losing her over it was a very good reason to think the bracelet bad news and his taking it from Ballantyne’s chest nowhere near the smart masterstroke he’d thought it the previous Monday. He could feel the teeth slip and chatter in the bag in his hand. It was eight o’clock now, long dark, and he felt like something strong to drink to steady his nerve and shift his prevailing mood of gloomy foreboding.
It wasn’t as if they could do this at a table at the Spyglass, surrounded by burnished ship’s brasses to a backdrop of cheery banter from the bar. It was going to be a sobering and perhaps frightening vigil. The only thing he could think to compare it to was a séance, and Fortescue had never felt the inclination to attend one of those. His phone rang in his pocket, making him jump just as he got to Ruthie’s front gate. He saw Patsy Lassiter’s name flash on the screen.
‘We’re doing it now, tonight.’
‘That’s why I’ve rung. I suspected tonight would be the night.’
‘It must be a bit like being God, having your powers of deduction.’
‘Alice used to say that. I can assure you it’s not.’
‘It makes everything predictable.’
‘Alice’s death wasn’t something I could predict. If I had done, I could have stopped it.’
He’d mentioned his dead wife twice in two sentences. It wasn’t something he did. Fortescue felt his mood plunge from foreboding into despondency. He said, ‘Mate, have you been drinking?’
‘No,’ Lassiter said, ‘the temptation’s there, I have to be honest and say it’s always there, but I haven’t been drinking.’
‘Do you ever sense Alice?’
There was a silence. Then Lassiter said, ‘All the time.’
‘Patsy, Jesus.’
‘It’s not what I called you to talk about, Phil. I don’t mind talking to you about the loss of Alice or about the booze because I’ve no better friend in the world.’
‘And both have been on your mind.’
‘Yes they have. But they’re not why I’m calling now. On balance, I think Liz Burrows is on the side of the angels. She’s disconcerting. Frankly, she’s frightening, but not deliberately so. Her intentions I think are basically good.’
‘So you rang to reassure me?’
‘No. I rang to warn you. The dead aren’t the best judges of what’s good for the living. I think what you’re about to do is probably extremely dangerous. If you don’t like what you hear, bag the bracelet, plug your ears and throw the fucking thing as far as you’re able into the sea.’
‘How did you know I was on the coast?’
‘You’re a maritime historian so you’re always on the coast. But right now you’re at Ruthie’s place in Ventnor. You’re doing this with her at her insistence, so where else would you be?’
‘I’m scared, Patsy. There’s no pretending otherwise.’ The bracelet roiled under cloth in the palm of his hand like something gleeful.
‘Just keep an eye on Ruthie. She’s too brave for her own good. Both of you are. Good luck, mate.’
Fortescue had a key to Ruthie’s cottage door. They’d reached that stage. But if he knew she was in, out of courtesy, he always knocked. It was
her home, not his. Just before he did knock, he thought about the question he’d asked Patsy just now about the booze. He thought it must be terrible to live always with that suspicion even among the people who thought most of you. It was a high price to pay in humility and distrust for sins you probably prayed daily would stay firmly in your past.
When he kissed her, Ruthie’s breath was a toxic cocktail of charred tobacco and white wine and recent Colgate toothpaste. Her faith in toothpaste was touching but misplaced, verging on delusional, maybe even mystical in the power with which she credited the stuff. She’d lit candles. Of course she had, she’d had a few glasses of Chablis and she’d reverted to Goth. From somewhere, the gloomy rumble of some black-clad, pale-faced band was present in angst-ridden chords. He could smell something that wasn’t her signature scents of Berkley Menthol cigarettes or Calvin Klein Eternity perfume and thought it probably a joss stick. He wasn’t having it. Matters were creepy enough without the atmospherics. He flicked on the lights and blew the candles out. He switched off the music.
Ruthie hiccupped, ‘Spoilsport.’
‘How many have you had?’
‘Just the one, Professor, needed to steady my nerves.’
He knelt and emptied the bag out in her fireplace surround, on the tiles in front of her wood burner, where they could both face it seated on her sofa. He did so as gingerly as if it had been a tarantula or a scorpion, unpredictable and deadly released from the confinement of its cloth prison. The bracelet slid and clattered and then was silent and still. He got up and retreated backwards and sat beside her, where Ruthie held his hands in both of hers as they stared at the ivory jumble of white incisors with which the great African magician had once adorned his scrawny arm.
They waited. After 20 minutes of stillness and silence, Fortescue could endure no more without a drink and he got up and went into the kitchen and poured and drank two inches of chilled vodka. He sat back down with the rosy glow of the spirit spreading through him, feeling better, or at least less bad.
‘I don’t think it wants to speak to us,’ Ruthie said, after 40 minutes of silence.
‘There’s no one else,’ Fortescue said.
‘There’s Patsy Lassiter,’ Ruthie said. ‘There’s Edith Chambers. Maybe it should really be talking to Felix Baxter.’
Fortescue nodded. What she said made perfect sense, if you took it on trust that a jumble of human teeth strung through by a silver chain was somehow capable of speech. For a moment, he wondered had Liz Burrows simply been a victim of a breakdown or insanity. Then he remembered the teeth closing on his own wrist in the museum basement in Liverpool and he dismissed the suspicion.
After an hour, he put the bracelet back into the bag and took the bag back to his car where he put it in the boot. The walk there felt longer than it should have. He thought the bracelet might writhe and whisper confidentially in his grip en route. It might wish to confide in him alone. That didn’t happen, though. Ruthie was waiting for him wearing her coat at her porch, hugging herself against the damp night chill when he returned. He said, ‘What now?’
‘The Spyglass,’ she said. ‘A few tequila slammers wouldn’t go amiss. That was horrible, Phil.’
He nodded. It had been horrible. But he thought they both knew it could have been much, much worse. And under the immediacy of relief, he felt disappointment welling. He’d hoped to learn something of value. After provoking Monday’s row with Ruthie and enduring five fraught days of anticipation, all he’d done in the end was waste an hour of their precious time together.
‘Tequila slammers it is,’ he said. He didn’t often feel like getting drunk, but tonight was an exception. He’d hoped to learn something before his stepdaughter left for New Hope the following day aboard Baxter’s monogramed chopper. He’d hoped actually to learn something that might stop her going.
Walking hand-in-hand with Ruthie to the Spyglass, he wondered whether anything would have done that. Journalists didn’t shirk from danger. Instead they sought it out, because danger meant stories. They didn’t hanker after a humdrum life. They took risks with their own safety. At least, they did if they were of the intrepid variety. Edie’s model and mentor in the profession had been her Auntie Lucy. The fearless curiosity of Lucy Church had in the end got her killed, but that hadn’t put Edith off, had it?
Telling her not to go wouldn’t work. She knew first-hand how dangerous New Hope could be. Some of the hazards present on the island when she’d gone there 18 months ago were no longer a threat, but it was never safe and had claimed its most recent life less than a week earlier. Greg Cody’s disappearance would only have sparked Edie’s interest further. Telling her not to go – ordering her – wasn’t something Fortescue could do in dealing with a mature woman of 20. She might not laugh at him. Love and respect would prevent that, but she’d certainly disobey anything resembling a command.
He stopped walking. Ruthie stopped beside him. He called Patsy Lassiter.
‘I’m all ears, Phil.’
‘It was a waste of time.’
‘So why have you called?’
‘When you had dinner with Edie the other night, did you tell her anything useful about New Hope?’
‘I told her about some places there she’d be wise steering clear of. She was definitely listening.’
‘Good.’
‘I’ve been thinking all day about calling her and asking her not to go.’
‘It wouldn’t work, Patsy.’
‘I’d beg her if I thought it would do any good.’
‘It wouldn’t.’
‘I know.’
‘Do you believe in the power of prayer?’
‘Not usually,’ Patsy Lassiter said, ‘but I’ll be saying one for Edie tonight and expect you will too.’
In calm weather, Dave Carter and his lads had taken to doing exactly what Derek Johnson had told Helena Davenport could be done to make their radio transmitter function effectively. They’d haul the kit aboard an R.I. and head for a point 800 metres offshore and drop anchor and fire it up battery powered to report into Baxter Enterprises H.Q. away from whatever interference contaminated the island’s atmosphere, the signal crystal clear, strong and completely steady.
Thus they got four hours warning that the chief was paying them a visit. This short-notice was completely characteristic of the man. He paid well enough that people shouldn’t be sleeping on the job. Any disorganization or dishevelment, any sign of poor practice or sloppy maintenance and someone would pay for it with dismissal, shipped back to the mainland ignominiously and without a penny’s compensation.
There was no chance of that happening. Their barbecue had been Dave Carter getting as sloppy as he ever did and that had been on their own time, off-duty. Professionally, he was punctilious and more than competent. So when the helicopter chuntered into sight on the eastern horizon there was no panic or nervousness among the little delegation gathered by the old colony dock to greet it. They were actually looking forward to seeing Felix Baxter. He was a lively character, down-to-earth, full of energy and brimming with wisecracks, generous with the bonuses he tended to splash about.
They’d cranked up the heating at the complex. The windows there, subdued in sunlight because of the glass Helena Davenport had deliberately chosen, nevertheless sparkled. The façade was free of bird shit and spindrift scum and salt. It looked immaculate in its splendid isolation, Johnson thought, except it didn’t really look isolated, because it looked so much as though it belonged. Helena was a talented woman. Terrible taste in movies, but a genuinely gifted architect.
They’d told no one about the message left on the bathroom mirror. After considering it for the forty minutes it took to reach the spot on the way back to the camp on their quads, Johnson pulled up and first told Carter about the discovery of the incisor and then dug out and shown it to him. He thought it irresponsible and amateurish to do otherwise, really. If the maintenance crew faced a real hazard, their leader should know about it, he reasoned. This
was particularly true since the tooth had probably belonged to the man Carter had recently replaced.
Carter had winced looking at the tooth, smelling the pungent stink the rotting circle of gum gave off close-to.
‘You’re an ex-copper, Deggsy,’ he said. ‘Your boys are all either that or they’re ex-forces. You’re trained for what people like you call hostile scenarios. I’m not. If that was pulled out of Greg Cody’s jaw, I’m completely out of my depth.’
‘We’re all out of our depth,’ Johnson said. ‘The message on the mirror proves we’re not alone on the island. Cody’s disappearance suggested the intruder means us harm and this only goes to prove it. And none of us has seen anyone. A three-man patrol isn’t much, given the size of the island and the cover available for concealment. But my lads are hand-picked, highly mobile, it’s 24-7 and we’ve seen absolutely fuck all.’
‘You’re going to radio in for reinforcements?’
Just after 24 hours after that exchange, Johnson watched the approaching helicopter still unsure of what his answer was. He might take Baxter to one side and have a quiet word and the chief was the sort of mercurial bloke who might just quietly kill the messenger. He could be nice, but instinct told Johnson he was never going to be open to bad news concerning the costliest gamble he’d ever taken in his entire business life.
He could imagine the exchange:
We’ve got unwelcome company on the island, chief.
What kind of company?
I don’t really know except that it’s hostile.
Have you actually seen them?
No.
So you haven’t challenged them?
No.
But you’re sure they’re here?
Yes.
Then you’re not doing the job I pay you for.
Whoever had written the message on the mirror knew far too much for comfort about him personally. The meaning had been plain; it meant go and it meant do so now. But it had been written backwards in tribute to the redrum warning scrawled on a wall at the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. That had been ‘murder’ written backwards and the leaver of their bathroom warning had somehow been aware that the story had been lately in his thoughts.
The Colony Trilogy Page 63