He did something then he hadn’t done once since returning from the cottage on New Hope he’d rebuilt. He went to listen to some music. It was by now quite late on Sunday evening. His hi fi had become dusty with neglect in the long absence from song in his life. He knew what he wanted to listen to, an album that had become a favourite before his island sojourn, after Edie Chambers had advised him to learn a few folk songs as a precaution should Rachel Ballantyne wish to pluck them from his mind.
He switched on the player and looked for the CD he’d chosen to listen to on the shelf where they were listed alphabetically. He ran a finger along their spines. The one he wanted was Kate Rusby’s Sleepless, which had on it Sweet Bride and her gorgeous version of The Wild Goose. But it wasn’t there.
Then he noticed something on top of one of the speaker cabinets he definitely hadn’t left there. He was by nature and habit methodical, punctiliously neat. He walked across the room and saw that Sleepless had been singled out already and put there for him. On top of it was a single bloom plucked from the vase of them Helena had brought him. He knew that Helena hadn’t put it there. He thought he knew who had. He’d only met one person in his life possessed of an authentic psychic gift, one woman who would have known which album he’d intended after all these months of willful silence to listen to.
Tears of grief and surprise and gratitude suddenly bleared his sight and smarted and then trickled down his face. The solitary flower was the sign that Alice approved. She was happy for him. He’d embarked upon a new and for him unexpected chapter. He felt found and that feeling inflicted upon him a sudden sensation not of loss, but of parting. Patrick Lassiter knew he’d sensed his late wife’s presence in that house for the last time.
Dawn on Monday morning broke anxiously for Derek Johnson. The fine weather had held. Dave Carter and one of his boys, Alan Newton, had decided to break the monotony with a night’s fishing aboard one of the R.I.’s they had as part of their haul of equipment on the island. The chief’s visit had gone without mishap. He’d been helicoptered off the previous afternoon all smiles, with his not quite docile pet reporter in tow.
He’d been full of praise for the job they’d done and were continuing to do. There was an extra grand added to the pay of every man there at the end of the month. That amounted to twelve thousand pounds, which Johnson, perhaps more jaundiced than the rest, thought a drop in Baxter’s considerable ocean. Dave Carter had been pleased and possibly relieved, though. He’d needed some encouragement after the story of the delinquent generator and the grisly relic of Cody’s incisor. The chief had provided it.
Carter’s belief, only briefly discussed, was that however theoretically malevolent the island might be, the sea surrounding it was benign. His reasoning concerned their expensively unreliable radio transmitter. It functioned haphazardly on land, given to all sorts of snarls and cutouts and weird distortions; but it worked perfectly well once you got it a decent distance offshore.
It was a plausible theory, and one in which Johnson had felt no faith whatsoever. Personally, he’d no more have spent a night anchored off New Hope in a rubber boat than he’s spend another night alone at the elegant complex the voluptuous and much-missed Helena Davenport had masterminded on the island.
Johnson was missing Helena. This was not as a consequence of any salacious intent on his account, but because he thought women sometimes got to the bottom of things much quicker and more directly than men. If she were still there, he figured he’d be less clueless about the strangeness of the island than he was. He’d also feel less lonely. In a short period chronologically, he considered she’d become a genuine friend.
He tried to get a response from the shortwave he was carrying, but there was no sign of life from Carter’s end. Alan Newton was from Barmouth on the Welsh coast and had been an RNLI volunteer there for a five year stint. Their R.I.’s on New Hope were the same model the lifeboat crews handled and so Newton was an experienced sailor familiar with the craft he was aboard. If he was still aboard it, Johnson thought, looking out to sea from a point just beyond the Shanks cottage, sweeping the horizon with a pair of Zeiss binoculars that generally missed nothing.
How far out would they have risked going? Quite a distance, because Newton was so bloody confident and because every foot for Carter, subconsciously at least, was a foot further from the unnatural hazards of the island. Plus the bigger fish favoured the deeper waters. And there were abundant fish-stocks out there. They weren’t depleted. The trawler men of Mallaig and Stornoway generally avoided the area close to New Hope out of long-held superstitions. They thought it an unlucky place.
Morning had broken dully, sunless with a raw chill and a strengthening wind that whipped at the hem and cuffs of the cagoule he wore. They’d had almost a week of spring-like weather, but it was still February and the unseasonal spell looked and felt at an end. There was a rising chop on the water, not yet a swell, but it would get there given an hour or two. Johnson felt the anxiety in his stomach tighten a notch.
If something fatal had befallen those two men, severe weather would only make their fate more ambiguous, the ex-copper in him insisted. The North Atlantic was inherently hazardous, a hostile environment and the home to countless natural calamities. If those boys had disappeared it would seem much less mysterious in the teeth of a rising storm than Cody’s vanishing had done.
Johnson’s anxiety lasted until just before 11am, when one of his team called in having spotted debris washed-up on the shore of a cove a mile roughly to the northwest of the crofter’s cottage.
‘Bodies?’
‘Nope, you need to see this though, boss.’
‘Moving.’
He took a quad there, overland, the coastal route too dangerous by then in the gathering swell that the squall hitting them had fostered, the engine deafened by the withering screech of the wind and the rain smearing the goggles he’d been forced to put on in the face of its needling assault.
The descent to the cove was rocky and steep and he almost tumbled down over it, seeing his headlamp swap a view of turf for the void of empty air only just in time to brake and bring the bike to a shuddering, skidding halt on the brink of the decline.
He clambered down, buffeted, hampered by the spume and spindrift reducing visibility to only a few feet in light shed gloomily from low, sullen cloud. He was agile for so big a man and grateful for it, thankful for all the scampering drills the rugby coaches had forced him to endure over the seasons of his sporting life.
There wasn’t much to see. There was a bait box and a smashed oar and a large section of pulverized rubber; but it was enough. The rubber bore the stenciled serial number of the craft Carter and Newton had taken out.
Ricky Hurst had found it. He was a former Royal Marine, hard as nails, three tours in Helmand Province, a veteran of minefields and coastal assaults, of firefight ambushes and close I.E.D. encounters he never really spoke about. He was a Glaswegian and naturally pale under his crop of red curls, but today his facial skin had a taut stretch to it and looked almost translucent under hair plastered to his skull. His eyes too were pale and studiedly neutral.
He said, ‘Collision with something colossal, boss. Maybe dragged under the hull and into its propellers. Catastrophic damage, they wouldn’t have known what hit them and they wouldn’t have had a chance.’
‘No chance at all,’ Johnson said. They wouldn’t have known what hit them. He was thinking about the crack in the glass of Helena Davenport’s picture window, the dark eclipse and thump of impact she’d described to him.
Hurst fixed him with a stare. Then he glanced back at the wreckage. ‘No offence to you, boss, but this is some sorry fucking mess,’ he said.
Johnson just nodded.
There was nothing tangible to discuss. They’d been confronted by the certainty of death in the violence of the tempest. Marine tragedies occurred. Everyone knew the risks of small boats on big and busy seas. The circumstantial evidence wasn’t so much persuasive as ove
rwhelming. But men with Hurst’s proven talent for survival also possessed a well-honed instinct for danger they tended always to trust. Neither of them said anything further, only because neither of them needed to.
Johnson got astride his quad and rode back to the compound. He walked straight to what was laughably called their communications room and fired up the wireless transmitter. Its display of lights glowed green as the twin power metres surged and settled and he was reminded of that American phrase about all the lights being on but there being nobody home. It was a definition of madness, as was the habit of repeating the same action and expecting a different outcome; but he had to persist, had to try to do his duty and call this into Baxter Enterprises HQ and alert the coastguard if he could.
A moan ululated out of the set so wretchedly child-like in tone it made him physically recoil. For some reason he was reminded of the word scrawled on the bathroom mirror at the Experience complex. Was he listening now to the scrawler, was that her crooning away in the ether? Leave, she had warned them, a warning unheeded and too late now for poor dead Dave Carter. Carter, who’d never make him wince again at some dubious barbecue wisecrack. Johnson closed his eyes and gritted his teeth with his headphones clamped and persisted in slowly twisting the knob, praying for an audible frequency and an end to that spectral voice.
Georgia Tremlett got to Stornoway aboard the ferry on Monday evening. The crossing was rough and the vessel smelled sourly of vomit from seasick passengers that hadn’t all made it to the crowded latrines in time. She spoke to a deckhand who told her it was much worse further out but she wasn’t discouraged by that. She’d booked a room in a Stornoway B&B with no intention of travelling on to New Hope with anything other than several hours of daylight left to her in which to set up camp.
She thought Seamus Ballantyne’s old colony settlement the best place to look for an evidential trail. She’d establish camp close to its sheltering wall. She knew it had been declared a World Heritage Site, but though she’d be guilty of trespass without official permission to visit and in the absence of a guide, she would be careful in damaging nothing and taking no trophies or souvenirs away. She’d always been fastidious and scrupulous in her past fieldwork and those habits wouldn’t change just because this was unsanctioned and a less orthodox mission than those had been.
She was much more excited than afraid. She was slightly daunted by the ambition of what she intended to prove, but not really concerned for her own safety. One presumed fatality in all the time Felix Baxter’s infrastructure had taken to assemble didn’t amount to the presence of a ravenous monster to her. She wasn’t looking to confront something capering, demonic and hungry. She was looking only for evidence that it had been there in the island’s bleak and mysterious past.
Perhaps she would find hair and skin samples in what had been its lair. Perhaps she would find a pile of gnawed human bones, the flesh devoured by some species its recovered DNA would insist was a stranger to the known world. She was confident she would find enough even without hard physical evidence to substantiate what she intended to write. She thought in short that she was on to a winner.
Rachel Ballantyne, her persistent folkloric myth, would provide Georgia’s compelling sub-plot. She didn’t really expect to come face to decomposing face with the revenant of Seamus’s daughter either. Even if the story was true and her antic spirit was there, she’d have no business with a visiting academic. She’d left Baxter’s people alone, presumably indifferent to their presence, unless she enjoyed their company from an elusive distance.
Georgia thought about calling Professor Fortescue and sharing with him her theory about the Being’s solitary weakness. Then she decided against doing so. She would save that revelation for the book she intended to write. Fuck Professor Fortescue. She’d have enjoyed doing that herself, but he was shacked up in Ventnor with his black-clad, tattooed tramp. ‘Good luck to them,’ she said to herself, actually wishing them just the opposite.
She dumped her rucksack in her room. She went to find the harbour bar where the fishing fleet did their drinking. She didn’t think many of them would be going out into the exposed ocean on a night as rough as this one was. She wanted to find someone who’d take her to New Hope just as soon as the weather improved. That might be by dawn the following day, she knew meteorological conditions could and did change swiftly in the Hebrides. She reckoned a two-hour window, given the distance, all she needed.
At her third attempt in the busy harbour, Georgia found her bar. She got four flat refusals before an elderly salt drinking something from a pewter mug with whisky chasers turned overhearing her and said, ‘Adam Cox is your man, miss.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘He went before, 18 month ago. Story is he did it for the price of his diesel. He can only say no.’
Adam Cox did his drinking in another bar on the other side of the harbour. The walk there was rainy and windy and cold, but Georgia was just glad he wasn’t teetotal and she could locate him at all. She felt lucky so far in this enterprise and hoped her luck would hold.
She saw a young man who answered the old sailor’s description. He was in conversation with two other men roughly his own age. She asked him could she have a private word and they went and stood in the pub’s porch and she explained where it was she wanted to go to and he told her he wouldn’t take her.
‘Apparently you’ve taken people there in the past.’
‘I took one person 18 months ago and I took her against my better judgment. And when we got there, I tried to dissuade her from going ashore. And that was in the summer, when it barely gets dark. It wasn’t the middle of winter like it is now.’
‘How much did she pay you for the crossing?’
‘It’s none of your business and it’s not relevant.’
‘I’ll double it,’ Georgia said.
‘The answer’s still no.’
Georgia was intrigued. ‘Who was she, 18 months ago, Mr. Cox, and why did she go there?’
‘She was a woman named Ruthie Gillespie. She was scared, which made her very brave, if you get my drift.’
‘Oh, I get your drift alright.’
‘She went because some friends of hers on the island were in trouble. That’s what she said. They needed help and she went there to help them.’
Georgia took stock of what she’d just been told. She wondered had Professor Fortescue been one of the people in trouble on the island 18 months earlier. He hadn’t let on to her that he’d been back after the expedition in ’10. Maybe he’d simply not thought his return worth remarking upon. But he was in one piece. And Ramshackle Ruthie, his Goth party animal squeeze, was also in one piece. If no harm had come to someone as hapless as her on the island then it really couldn’t harbour any serious threat.
‘I’ll give you five hundred pounds Adam, for a one-way ride.’ She was thinking of the advance she’d asked of her American publisher on emailing the book synopsis. She’d suggested eighty thousand dollars would deter her from shopping around further.
‘It’s not a ride,’ he said, looking out over the stone of the quayside to where the whitecaps welled and seethed in the sea beyond. ‘It’s a voyage. And no one’s going out in this.’
‘Agreed,’ Georgia Tremlett said. ‘But tomorrow’s another day and the weather might have calmed and I’m actually thinking 750 of our English pounds might prove a welcome temptation in a thin season.’
He looked at her sharply. He said, ‘How’d you know times are hard?’
‘You and your friends were drinking halves in there,’ she said. ‘I teach students. So I know young men your age don’t drink halves unless they’re having to.’
‘Maybe we’re in training for something.’
‘Or maybe you’re about to have your boat repossessed.’
‘Let’s see how tomorrow’s weather leaves us,’ he said.
And Georgia smiled, knowing that she’d booked her passage.
Chapter Twelve
Feli
x Baxter felt haunted. He’d felt that way ever since his misguided trip to the museum in Liverpool and its weird aftermath. The pale, crumpled visage of the urchin on the horror movie poster he thought he’d seen outside the derelict cinema building might have bleached to nothing in life, but was still vivid in his mind, the head turning and following his dazed progress through the rain along the street with its vacant eyes.
He thought he knew very well who she had been. She was the wraith caught by the New Hope crofter David Shanks on cine film in the 1930s he’d always airily dismissed as faked. He’d had a change of heart and mind about that. He didn’t think it faked anymore. Edith Chambers had seen whatever Rachel Ballantyne had become over two centuries of antic, impossible life. Edith was a bit naïve and still possessed the innocence of youth, but she wasn’t delusional and she wasn’t a liar either. She said she’d seen Rachel 18 months earlier on the island and Baxter believed her.
He’d been fearful during his weekend there. He’d put on a pretty good show for Edith and he didn’t think she’d seen through the bluster to the jumpy, anxious reality. He’d studied the faces of Dave Carter and Derek Johnson, his team leaders there and he’d seen strain and sensed a degree of collusive secrecy he’d dismissed at the time as paranoia, except in retrospect it didn’t seem like that at all. He thought the strain came from the effect on their nerves of the things they were hiding from him only in order to protect their precious livelihoods.
Given longer there and given the privacy from Edith to do it, he’d have tried to get it out of them. He might not, though, have succeeded in this. He had a reputation for killing the messenger. Carter and Johnson both of them knew it and they were family men with the financial obligations wives and children bought.
Or they had been. Half an hour earlier, his PA Joy had called him and told him the bad news. Johnson had managed one of his intermittent transmissions on that expensively unreliable radio kit they were equipped with there. And he’d used it to deliver a sobering report. Dave Carter and an electrician named Alan Newton had disappeared aboard a rigid inflatable. Bits of the boat had washed up earlier that day. They’d set off for a few hours of night fishing in calm weather as a break in their routine and conditions having worsened, their vessel had washed ashore in fragments of wreckage. Or some of it had. Most of it, like the two men, was still missing.
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