New Hope Island was becoming an increasingly accident-prone place. He was reminded of the words of that detective, Patrick Lassiter, questioning him about the island in the aftermath of Cody’s vanishing.
I was left alone there.
That phraseology was both ambiguous and disturbing if only because not every resident on New Hope seemed to share the police commander’s good fortune.
He’d have to go back. Unhampered by his pretty and ambitious journalist student chaperone, he’d seek out the unambiguous, uncensored truth. He’d bring with him a big dose of rationality, a large serving of skepticism, a welcome dash of hard-headedness. Except that he truthfully felt none of his brasher character traits really suited these particular circumstances. These peculiar circumstances, he thought, because they seemed not only unique to New Hope Island, but somehow determined by the Island itself.
He’d felt watched there, if he was going to be completely honest with himself. And not just by his alert and curious student companion. She hadn’t so much observed as studied him there and he’d had the curious sense she wasn’t the only one doing it. This covert surveillance – and that’s what it had felt like – had made him feel self-consciously uneasy whenever out exposed on the open ground. And he’d sensed his people there felt it too and didn’t much like it either. They’d endured it for longer. They hadn’t got used to it. It might prove a deterrent to his paying guests if it persisted. He’d have to go back to see if he could sort matters out and put his perfectionist mind at rest.
Baxter was in his Manchester flat and Manchester was 30 miles from Liverpool, where Rachel Ballantyne might well have been born. That thought occurred to him now. Her father had lived there before his New Hope epiphany and his departure for his Hebridean Kingdom of Belief with his doomed followers. A large and growing part of Baxter expected to encounter her again and he dreaded that in a way so fearful he would never have been able to explain it to anyone.
He’d always been fired by self-belief and his hard-earned status as a business visionary was something he’d felt was deepening and expanding with the progression of the New Hope project from ambitious dream to breathtaking reality. Now though, he was having these serious doubts.
But would he pull the plug even if he could? The question wasn’t one seriously worth asking himself. Schemes enacted on this epic scale had their own colossal momentum.
He was in too deep with too many interested parties to extricate himself at this late stage. If he tried to do it, he’d alienate the investment partners he’d worked so hard to cultivate and needed for any sort of commercial future. If he pulled the plug he’d bankrupt himself financially and destroy his business credibility at a stroke.
That was the rational side of his thinking. The irrational was the impulse that had impelled him to close the curtains of every window in the flat as darkness descended half an hour earlier. The night glitter of Mancunian life was something he generally enjoyed in this buoyant northern English city. Only London bettered it for energy and enterprise. But he feared he might see a child-like figure on the other side of the panes, someone ragged and forlorn, her features unfinished or just forgotten over time, pale and curious and undeterred by the fact that his was a penthouse eleven floors above the pavement.
His phone rang, making him jump.
Joy, his PA.
‘Not more bad news?’
‘Just checking in with you, Felix. By your standards, you’re being unusually quiet. Anything I can do?’
‘Yeah, please, doll. Charter a chopper for Wednesday morning to take me to the island.’
‘You only got back from there yesterday.’
‘Left a couple of loose ends need tying up a bit more neatly. I’ll probably stay just a single night.’ Baxter checked the weather in the vicinity obsessively, three or four times a day. He knew it was rough now but also knew the forecast was encouraging.
He could and would carry on as though the misgivings he had were nothing more than the neuroses a project of the magnitude of the New Hope Experience would naturally engender in anyone sane in overall charge of it. But psychologically the acid test for Baxter concerned his son, 18, on his gap year, enjoying travelling in Central America and the only person in the world he really cared about.
Would he let Danny take a student job on New Hope; let him earn some pocket money bar-tending or as a field-guide or waiter or lifeguard? Not in a million years, he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t risk his precious son’s wellbeing for a single moment there.
He thought he heard a noise, then. He thought he heard a smudge of sound from outside, a soft, dull, beckoning thump against his sitting room window. He swallowed bile and fear and on legs that felt they didn’t properly belong to him, walked over and pulled back the heavy drapes and took a look. There was nothing there, when he did. There was just empty space and below the distant twinkle of the night city. He’d have a drink, he decided. He didn’t generally drink alone, but knew he wouldn’t sleep this evening without a nightcap.
‘I thought maybe an eagle, or possibly an albatross.’
‘Neither creature would have the mass. And at that velocity there’d have been a mess left behind, albatross blancmange smeared right across the pane.’
‘Charming thought.’
‘I can’t think of anything living with the strength. Maybe a gorilla with a sledgehammer could do it, if great apes used tools and were native to the Hebrides. But I honestly don’t think even that would work.’
Helena Davenport was outside Aberdeen early on Tuesday morning with Miles Stanhope, managing director of Rampart Glass and a worried man because his company had profitable contracts with security services around the world occupying offices that were required to be fortifications as well as places of work. They also manufactured and supplied windscreen glass to a variety of heads of state and royal households. They did a lot of lucrative business in the Middle and Far East and their reputation, so far, was untarnished.
Stanhope was a small, neat man in an immaculate suit and with what looked to her like an expensive recent haircut. The overall effect was spoiled by a sort of pecking agitation, like a bothered hen.
He’d arranged a demonstration for Helena, which she thought unnecessary. She knew all about the durability of the product, but she also knew what she’d left behind at the complex on New Hope. Something had achieved what Stanhope considered impossible there. She thought the demonstration set up as much to reassure him as to persuade her.
She had no intention of telling anyone about what had happened. She’d asked Derek Johnson to keep it to himself and Felix Baxter didn’t sweat the small stuff. He’d mentioned it in a phone call the previous day after his own return from a flying visit to the island and she’d told him Rampart Glass would make good the damage at the company’s own expense this week and he seemed satisfied with that.
The demonstration involved the sort of old-fashioned ball and chain suspended from a crane boom that used to be used to demolish houses. It swung through forty-five degrees gaining momentum as it did so and collided with the secured vertical sheet with a booming off-key thud of impact. The iron ball juddered on its chain. When everything came to a halt, the glass wasn’t even scratched.
‘Very impressive,’ Helena felt obliged to say, which it was. It was a hitherto unstoppable force meeting an immovable object you could see through with absolute clarity. Rampart’s product was a remarkable feat of technology and manufacturing skill.
‘That pane on New Hope must have had an inherent flaw and our testing procedures failed to reveal it,’ Stanhope said, the line he’d been taking ever since she’d shown him the photos of the crack taken on her phone. ‘We’ve already revised them,’ he said.
She nodded, knowing there had been no inherent flaw. Impact had done the damage. ‘When will you replace it?’
‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘We’d have done it sooner but for the difficulty of communicating with the maintenance crew and security boys on the isla
nd. And the weather’s been uncooperative over the past couple of days. But we’ll do it tomorrow, without fail and of course at no charge.’
‘That’s great,’ she said.
He cleared his throat and said, ‘Would this experience put you off using us in the future?’
Helena couldn’t think of a build anywhere else requiring the strength and durability characteristic of the New Hope complex. But she answered him honestly. ‘I’d use you again without hesitation,’ she said. ‘Your product’s the best of its type in the world.’
It hadn’t been an eagle or an albatross or a great ape wielding a sledgehammer or a pickaxe. It had been substantial enough in size to cast the entire room she’d stood in into shadow. It had been immensely strong and nimble enough to get out of sight quickly. And if it hadn’t been flying, it had been an agile climber because the suite she’d occupied had been sixty feet above ground.
Had it really wanted to get in, it would have, Helena thought for the first time with a shiver. It was only testing the obstacle to its doing so. It hadn’t quite breached the defences, but it had learned that it could. And then it had found a less direct and cleverer way by stopping the generator and disabling the locks.
Whatever it was, it was smart and elusive as well as imponderably strong. It had killed Greg Cody and left them the evidence as what? Perhaps just as proof it had a grisly sense of humour. They’d been toyed with, her and Derek Johnson. They’d been very fortunate to survive the experience. Had the thing lurking on the island chosen to attack them, they would have been its helpless victims.
The reason she’d keep the failure of a pane supplied by Rampart Glass to retain its structural integrity on New Hope Island was quite simple. Helena didn’t think anything natural had inflicted the damage. She couldn’t really blame the company for a crack put there by something with no rightful place in the world.
Patrick Lassiter had told her about his pledge made to Rachel Ballantyne. He’d been adamant the revenant preacher’s daughter had not put the crack in the pane. She was powerful but physically petite and it simply wasn’t her style to steal about unseen. Evidently she was content to leave some people alone on the island. Helena had gained the strong impression that Rachel actually liked Patrick Lassiter, felt a fondness close to human for him. Antagonized, she became a cavorting, gleeful, murderous nightmare. The difficulty apparently was in predicting what might antagonize her. And her fondness for Patrick would not endure the insult of a broken promise.
It occurred to Helena then that if Patrick kept his promise and successfully delivered Rachel the rest she sought, the sly, furtive, pane-cracking monster would have New Hope entirely to itself. She had no idea why, but this notion troubled her. There was no logic to it, but she thought if that happened, the island would become an even more potent hazard to any people there than it already was.
Fog and calm marked Georgia Tremlett’s arrival on New Hope Island. It was only a sign to her that her good fortune was holding. Unless it was actually fate, she thought. Professor Fortescue’s arrival in her professional life had come completely unexpectedly and there were half a dozen other specialists in the field to whom he could just as easily have gone. Through him she’d acquired the priceless source of Thomas Horan’s journal and been given the opportunity she was now exploiting. Was there a strong element of destiny involved?
If there was, she might not altogether have finished with him personally. Ruthie Gillespie’s charms were both limited and superficial and clever men when they were also physically attractive had low boredom thresholds. She’d likely be extremely busy for the foreseeable future with this new project she’d embarked upon. But in three months or six months, the maritime professor would likely begin to find Ruthie’s company tedious; superficially picturesque, but deeply unsatisfying.
Adam Cox was taciturn on their crossing to the island. Clearly he needed the money she was paying, but her generosity didn’t encourage him to communicate beyond what was necessary. She thought that perhaps her jibe about him and his drinking buddies only being able to afford halves had hit home. Young men had their pride and she’d hurt his by being right about his scrimping.
Eventually he asked, ‘Do you know the island?’
‘I’ve studied the topography.’
‘Where is it you want to get to?’
‘Ballantyne’s colony settlement.’
‘Jesus.’
‘I’m not expecting him to be there.’
But Cox didn’t respond to the joke. He said, ‘There’ll be some security on the island, has to be, with all that new development there. But they won’t see my boat in this fog. I’ll paddle the dinghy to put you ashore but I’m not hanging about, Miss.’
She wasn’t too concerned about the security. She wasn’t trespassing on the island, Baxter didn’t own it and the bits he’d developed she had no interest in at all. When she’d got what she wanted she’d make contact with Baxter’s people there only as a means of getting off New Hope. Their presence enabled her to do that pretty much at the time of her choosing. That was another piece of luck, unless it was again the helping hand of fate.
He rowed her ashore at a spot about a mile to the east of the New Age Experience complex and on the other side of the island from the crofter’s cottage, where he said he thought the workers’ compound was likeliest to be sited because it was the best spot weather-wise on the whole of the island.
‘You’re going to the worst spot, weather-wise. It’s on the heights, so it’s exposed to gales and storms.’
‘A wonder he chose it,’ she said.
‘No, it’s not, Miss. Seamus Ballantyne was sorry for what he’d done in his former life. Living there was deliberate. It was his penance.’
‘You know a lot about it, for somewhere you avoid.’
‘It’s knowing about it makes me avoid it.’
She hefted her rucksack to the diminishing lap and gurgle of his oars as he rowed back into the fog out of sight and then hearing, leaving her alone on the shore. She could see little of her surroundings but the pebbles and scrub at her feet. It was very quiet and in the mist, everything appeared still, petrified. She knew if she kept going upwards she would likely reach her intended destination eventually.
It was ten o’clock on Tuesday morning. There were about seven hours of daylight left before darkness. It was more than ample time to orient herself, establish her camp and do a bit of preliminary exploration. She would start with Ballantyne’s infamous windowless church. She wanted to immerse herself in the culture of the colony in a way that helped her write, when the time came, vividly and evocatively about New Hope.
She set off daydreaming about the casting of the movie they would make about this one-woman expedition and its sensational findings. She thought that given a chic trim, Gemma Arterton would be great casting, though the part would probably go to an American actress to give the film greater appeal internationally at the box office. Jennifer Lawrence was probably a bit young, but there was such a thing as artistic license and she had the right steely, determined look about her.
Georgia was fit from her regular gym habit and so despite having done no fieldwork over recent years, found the going tolerable. Her rucksack weighed about 60 pounds, heavy because it contained her food rations and her tent. The load was well balanced and she could carry it if she rested at intervals. She had a litre bottle of water clinking metallically on her hip, knowing she could replenish that at any time from the freshwater tarns on the island.
She began to think about her quarry. The Being was a shape-shifter, able to assume the appearance of a human but probably much larger in its dimensions when it did so, at least according to the Algonquin mythology. The Wendigo of their tribal legends was both elusive and deadly, hard to spot but extremely bad news when you did see it, because it didn’t leave its witnesses alive to describe the experience.
Of the various explanations for where it came from, she thought somewhere alien to earth the most rat
ional. Species originating on earth had shorter lifespans than that generally claimed for the Being. They weren’t born carrying their own offspring. And man apart, no animal native to earth was deliberately vindictive. Some predators – great whites, polar bears, big cats – were capable of extreme savagery. But they didn’t any of them kill solely for pleasure.
The question she’d never be able to answer, was how Shaddeh had summoned the creature, coaxed it into mortal existence. From what she knew of him, he’d been born with the occult powers he possessed. Over his lifetime he’d refined them and he’d been feted and almost worshipped for what he could accomplish for his people. But Georgia thought his powers probably as much a mystery to him then as they were to her now. He could make the dead restless. He could affront nature. Or so it had been persistently claimed.
That thought made her wonder whether there were some mysteries that were simply better left unsolved. That was a sensible and pragmatic position for most people to take. But to her, professionally, it was also heresy. All her academic training insisted it was not just her job but her vocation to shed whatever light she could on these dark and esoteric enigmas.
She became aware of a slight feeling of self-consciousness, labouring upward in her hike. It was almost as though someone spectated, observing her progress with cold amusement through the grey blanket of the mist. She knew that was only her imagination, but it made her wonder did she look slightly ridiculous in her combat fatigues and watch-cap with the burden of the rucksack on her back. She’d tried on the outfit she was wearing at an outdoor store on Sunday afternoon in the Arndale Centre and thought she looked dashing and svelte. Now, she wasn’t so sure.
The Colony Trilogy Page 67