There were only two ways in which this could be possible. Either the mirror messenger could read minds; or had spied on him and Helena when they’d watched the Kubrick film together. Neither possibility offered any shred of comfort.
The helicopter got closer and then swooped and hovered over the concrete pad put there for its landings. It came down and the rotor-blades slowed and the weight of the craft settled. The fierce localized breeze it had brought with it weakened. A door opened and Baxter got out dressed casually in jeans and a black blouson jacket and helped a lithe young woman with blonde hair down to the ground. She was dressed in a leather jacket and combats and hiking boots and carried an overnight bag.
She looked around, sheltering her gaze from the lowering sun with a raised hand. You could tell by the body language that they weren’t an item. She was nearer his son’s age than she was the chief’s. She reminded Johnson of someone. Ever the gentleman, Baxter reached up to his window and performed the ritual post-flight courtesy of shaking hands with his pilot.
Johnson realized who it was the girl reminded him of. It was the TV doctor Jane Chambers, the telegenic virologist who’d done a hit series for the BBC about the Black Death. He remembered being stunned a couple of years earlier, stumbling across her obituary surfing the web on his phone. She’d been shockingly young to die. He remembered she’d been one of the experts on the expedition to the island in ’10.
Chapter Ten
When Patrick Lassiter opened the door to Helena Davenport, he was treated to a surprise. She had between her hands a large and colourful bouquet of fresh flowers. He said, ‘They can’t be for me.’
‘Don’t you like flowers?’
‘Everyone likes flowers.’
‘But you’ve got none in your house.’
‘It’s February.’
‘You wouldn’t have flowers in the house in July, Commander. You wouldn’t think to. And you’re wrong, they are for you, so invite me in and we’ll find a vase for them.’
He ushered her inside and took her coat and she found a dusty vase on a kitchen window sill and washed it out and arranged her bouquet and found a place for it on a table near the window of his sitting room where its winter blooms lustred richly and would lustre even more in daylight.
‘There,’ she said, flashing her green-eyed smile. He was aware of her perfume, her tailored dress, of the soft Scottish burr of her speaking voice. He hadn’t liked a woman so much on meeting one since Phil Fortescue had first introduced him to Ruthie Gillespie. Perhaps that was proof he didn’t have a type. Perhaps it just demonstrated that likeable women came in all shapes and sizes. He felt strongly physically attracted to her and he hadn’t felt that for any woman since before the death of his wife.
‘I’m assuming you’re a meat-eater.’
‘I imagine you’ve looked me up.’
‘Not your dietary preferences, I haven’t. The flowers threw me, but usually I’m quite adept at people.’
‘It depends, really,’ she said, ‘I haven’t eaten a burger or a bacon sandwich since my undergraduate days.’
‘So you’re a high-end carnivore.’
‘You’ve got me in one.’
‘Good, we’re having roast lamb.’
He poured her a glass of wine and got a Diet Coke for himself. Then he took her through to his conservatory, which he used as his home office. The rather battered pair of leather armchairs there were the most comfortable seating he owned. There were shelves of books and there was a desktop computer. A vintage Anglepoise shed a cone of yellow light. Magazines were piled atop a nest of Eames tables and the small oils on the walls looked to her eyes originals. It was a homely space but also businesslike, with his hung citations and career souvenirs. There at the rear of the house, beneath timber and glass, an old bronze radiator provided ample warmth, creaking and gurgling softly. There was no traffic noise.
‘You have a lovely home.’
‘It was my wife’s home. I didn’t have her for anything like long enough.’
‘You’re very direct.’
‘I think that’s trying to make up for lost time.’
‘The time you lost to drink?’
‘Tell me why you’re here, Helena, why you’ve come all this way.’
She took a sip of wine. She said, ‘I studied the history of New Hope Island before taking on the commission. So I know that what happened to Seamus Ballantyne’s Kingdom of Belief was at best a tragedy and at worst an atrocity.’
‘I’d stick with the latter description.’
‘I know you were on the expedition in ’10. I’ve heard a rumour it was you discovered the lost cine film David Shanks shot of a wraith he claimed was Rachel Ballantyne.’
‘It was me that found it. It was more than a wraith.’
‘I thought you’d left the island a safe place after the expedition?’
‘Recent events would suggest otherwise.’
‘I stayed in the complex I designed for a few days at Felix Baxter’s invitation. It was more in the way of a dare, I think. Architects are prone to take the money and run with really innovative builds, just in case the actuality reveals flaws the computer software didn’t at the blueprint stage.’
‘So you picked up his gauntlet,’ Lassiter said.
‘There were a couple of strange occurrences. Three, actually, I’d like to tell you about. But first I’d like you to tell me about your time on the island when you rebuilt the Shanks cottage. You were there for six months, weren’t you?’
‘Yes, almost to the day. Was that your intention in coming here, learning more about New Hope?’
‘To be perfectly frank my intention in coming here has shifted since you opened your door to me and invited me in. My motive in coming here is simpler. The island frightened me. I’m proud of what I created there but don’t want to collude in some kind of impending tragedy. I want to know is the island a dangerous place. Tell me about it.’
‘I thought grief-stricken was a hackneyed cliché, Helena, until I was personally stricken by grief. I was a mess when I took refuge on the island. I might not be the most reliable witness to events there in that period.’
She stared at him levelly without speaking for a long moment, licking her full lips, teasing a loose strand of her hair, coiling it glossily around a finger. She said, ‘Derek Johnson totally undersold you. He said you were good-looking in a hard sort of way. I already think you’re the most attractive man I’ve met in my entire adult life. I suspect you’re probably also the sanest. Tell me what happened on New Hope. Please don’t leave anything out.’
‘You might find it hard to believe.’
‘I’m not the skeptic I was.’
‘Just the same.’
You’ve an honest face, Patrick. Talk to me.’
So he did.
He told her about the secret places he’d found and the secret place that found him when he was lured there by what had once been Rachel Ballantyne. He told her about his audience with Rachel and the promise he’d made her. And he told her how curiosity evolved into hostility in his silent, secret observer after his discoveries and how when he left the island, it was because his instinct for self-preservation compelled him to go.
‘Now tell me your story,’ he said. ‘Start with the stuff you’re certain about.’
She sipped wine and smiled. She looked down into her lap and then up again to meet his eyes. She said, ‘The only thing I’m absolutely certain of is that I’d like to go to bed with you tonight, if it’s something you’d like too.’
‘I don’t think you need have any doubts at all about that,’ he said, ‘but we’ve dinner to get through first. Now you talk to me Helena, and I’ll try my best to concentrate on what you say.’
Georgia Tremlett was struggling to think of a way to overcome her disappointment. She’d discovered that Professor Fortescue wasn’t quite single after all. He’d been made a widower several years earlier when his rather famous and successful wife had died. More re
cently and improbably, he’d shacked up with a Goth children’s author from Ventnor on the Isle of Wight.
It was improbable because he was a respected academic and she wore elaborate tattoos and to Dr. Tremlett, looked quite druggy and possibly even a bit of a tramp where matters sexual were concerned. Slumming-it was the phrase they used in Manchester for what Fortescue was doing with Ruthie Gillespie. But Ruthie was pretty in a sluttish sort of way and Georgia knew that men thought with their dicks disappointingly often.
It was Sunday. She’d been to the gym and she’d done a bit of expensively ineffective retail therapy. She thought she might have another read of the Horan journal. It was priceless as a source and she already knew most of the text by heart. One of the many significant details it revealed was that Shaddeh could not use the power he possessed for magic to help himself.
He’d been able to lull those slaves chained around him into a trance-like slumber to ensure that his conversations with Thomas Horan in the vessel’s hold were confidential. But when he’d claimed occult powers and been challenged by the ship’s surgeon to use them to free himself of his bonds, he’d said the magic didn’t work that way. It was fascinating. Esoteric scholars had speculated for years on the paradox of his being taken into slavery. But that was without knowing the details Horan had made her so vividly aware of.
She could feel a Shaddeh monograph coming on. She could sense a paper on the Being that Hungers in the Darkness and see in her mind the stir that would cause when she cited all the circumstantial evidence for its existence on New Hope. She’d quote Fortescue as a witness to its presence there. She thought a quid-pro-quo of that sort only fair after the way she had enlightened him about the Being when they’d met.
Or she could go to New Hope, where her hankering for fieldwork would be satisfied and where first-person experience of the island would give her the material basis not just for a paper, but for a whole book. It would be scholarly but readable, atmospheric and actually quite definitive. It would also be sensational enough to become a bestseller on the non-fiction chart. All those Wendigo and Bigfoot sightings vindicated. Cynicism revoked in page-turning chapters of her unimpeachable prose and fastidious footnotes. It would make of the world a darker and more mysterious place than most people complacently supposed, but that was no bad thing. There’d be film rights, inevitably.
If Phil Fortescue wanted to get down and dirty with a Goth nobody with a loser’s taste for ink, then that was actually his business. He was welcome to his squalid private life. Georgia had business of her own. And she needed to get on with it. She was aware of Felix Baxter and his Celtic Disneyland plans for New Hope. If she was going to go, she had to get there before that ghastly New Age circus did and despoiled the island completely.
She could embark on this trip the following day. She had two seminars planned for the week ahead. She could delegate either or postpone both. She was head of Department and hers was anyway the sort of trophy appointment long on prestige and rather shorter on practical work. Research was the buzzword in centres of academic excellence these days and her research pedigree was flawless. She could wangle a week away at short notice to investigate something in her area of expertise that wouldn’t wait.
Suddenly she felt quite buoyant. A romantic fling with the ruggedly put-together Philip Fortescue would have been nice, but it didn’t compare to the peer-group glory and financial profit she could see a surreptitious week in the Hebrides providing her with. She decided she’d spend the afternoon writing a proposal to her American publisher, the Manhattan-based imprint that had paid her handsomely two years earlier for her book on African tribal magic. That had sold strongly. This would sell on a wholly different scale. She’d ask for a healthy advance and they’d pay it, promptly.
She wondered for a sobering moment whether going to New Hope would expose her to actual physical risk; not from the natural hazards of the island but from the unnatural phenomena for which Fortescue and Horan’s journal insisted Shaddeh was responsible.
She was still open-minded about the possibility of something real and tangible having resulted from his spells and curses. But she thought the chances of something stalking and then devouring her pretty outlandish, all in all. Baxter’s people had been there for months and the only fatality among them had almost certainly been accidental, a site-worker washed out to sea at night by a freak wave. That death might more grimly have been a suicide, it was naïve to think that totally impossible. What it hadn’t been, was deliberate or malevolent.
Georgia fired-up her laptop and got down to the business of writing her proposal. An hour later, she had a strong and fluent synopsis for the book she planned to write. She glanced at her wristwatch. There was still time to pop down to the Arndale Centre and buy some camping kit for when she reached her destination after her journey to the Hebrides the following day.
Edie Chambers had a go at kayaking. She put on a wetsuit and tried windsurfing, though there wasn’t much wind and the direction from which it came when it came at all was trickily inconsistent. She tried out a jet ski, circling the island in Felix Baxter’s wake with a giant named Derek Johnson bringing up their rear in case of mishaps. It was exciting, being part of a convoy and if the mood of the sea was unseasonably calm, her jet ski was fast and it was still the Atlantic Ocean spuming in her wake and filling her nostrils with brine.
Her aquatic adventures over, she scaled the heights and attempted a rock climbing pitch described in the brochure as difficult. She thought ‘impossible’ more accurate. Then a man named Dave Carter strapped her into a safety harness and she experienced what Baxter claimed was the longest zip-wire ride in Europe. Hurtling along on that was more thrilling than anything she’d ever experienced at any fairground or theme park she’d ever been to in her life and the views were nothing short of breathtaking.
She sat down to Sunday lunch at the Experience complex at 2 in the afternoon exhausted and impressed. The complex was a wonderfully atmospheric and sympathetic construction and her suite was the last word in luxury. She’d almost overcome her reservations about New Hope. She was almost optimistic about the future promised by what Baxter had built there. But she remembered the evening recently spent with Patsy Lassiter and a phrase Patsy was fond of repeating in this regard. The island’s got form, Patsy would say. And that was undeniably the case, Greg Cody the proof, his death still a sobering enigma.
Their food wasn’t the fare the guests would enjoy when the Experience opened proper. Guest menus were to be prepared by a team of top chefs. They’d already been headhunted from Scotland’s best restaurants. Today by contrast, they were sitting down to pre-cooked meals microwaved from frozen. But they weren’t at all bad and she was so hungry after her action-packed day that to Edie, everything she ate tasted delicious.
Baxter was Baxter, relentlessly energetic and charming and predictable in manifesting those qualities until halfway through their dinner together when he placed his knife and fork carefully to either side of his unfinished plate and said, ‘You lied to me.’
She knew immediately what he was referring to. Rachel. ‘Yes, I did.’
‘Why did you?’
She said, ‘It’s not something I wanted distracting you from answering my questions when I finally got the chance to ask them. I wasn’t the one being interviewed and profiled. I was trying to be professional.’
‘But you have seen her, haven’t you, Edith. You’ve seen Rachel Ballantyne.’
‘I have, Felix. I think you have too.’
He said, ‘Describe her to me.’
‘I’ve already done that.’
‘Not the first-hand version you haven’t.’
‘I was here 18 months ago. I was with a group including my stepfather, trying to find out what had happened to the people who’d disappeared here on the writers’ retreat held on New Hope back then. We were in the stone cellar where Ballantyne’s colonists stored the whisky they distilled before its buyers shipped it to the mainland.’
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br /> Baxter smiled, though he’d grown pale, the ruddy-cheeked colour exposure to the day’s adventures had given him drained now from his face. He said, ‘That cellar’s going to re-open as our souvenir and gift shop. Not that we’ll call it anything so crass.’
‘It was gloomy, poorly lit. There were three of us down there. And then suddenly, there were four. I saw her first, seated on top of one of the big oak barrels. At first you think she’s cute looking, picturesque with her blonde curls and urchin costume. But then you start to catalogue the detail and she becomes disturbing and horrific. She was a child who died of a fatal illness 200 years ago and yet she’s animate. Her face has a vague, unfinished look, as though poorly remembered. She creates a kind of disturbance in the atmosphere, a sort of dismay. She’s an affront to nature and she knows she is.’
‘That’s very eloquently put.’
‘Words are going to be my living so I try to use them precisely. And I’ve had a year and a half to think about it and I have thought about it, because she’s not a presence easily forgotten.’
‘I saw her only for a moment,’ Baxter said, ‘and in two dimensions. You’re bang on, though, saying she provokes dismay.’
‘Did she speak to you?’
‘I’ve done a bit of reading on ghosts and demonology since. I don’t think she was actually there. It was just a glimpse and then gone again and a long way from home. I think it was just a projection. It was in Merseyside, a week ago.’
‘It’s quite possible she was born in Liverpool.’
‘I know that,’ Baxter said, ‘but it’s here she lives, if ‘lives’ is the right word.’
‘So you believe in her existence?’
‘I know what I saw. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the effect it had on me.’
‘Doesn’t that concern you?’
Baxter looked at her. He’d kept the goatee, which suited him. He looked youthful in his jeans and denim shirt, with his grey hair tousled, seated here, at the heart of his burgeoning empire. To her surprise, Edie found herself feeling a bit sorry for him. He was glib and manipulative and rich, but she couldn’t help thinking that he was out of his depth, with not the remotest idea of just what he was letting himself in for.
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