Georgia began to wish the fog would clear. Yes, she might have to deal with one of Baxter’s jobsworth security patrols, but a wilderness you were unfamiliar with was unnerving when you were blinded to its hazards. Studying the topography on a contour map was nowhere near the same as being physically familiar with a place. She was totally unfamiliar with New Hope Island and the fog inflicted a degree of helplessness and risk she really didn’t like.
And it distorted sound. She kept hearing things for which the mind could find no rational excuse. She heard a small avalanche of stones trickle downward somewhere off to her left and then abruptly cease. She heard the cry and feathery swoop of some large avian creature and wondered was she approaching a protective eagle’s nest. She heard the mournful blast of a foghorn amplified from miles away over the still sea through the petrified air and wished for a moment she was back in the reticent company of Adam Cox, headed for the warm refuge of Stornoway aboard his chugging boat.
By now the feeling of being watched was doing more than make Georgia Tremlett feel self-conscious. It was making her skin crawl. She was no longer remotely concerned with her appearance. She was itchy and cold with gooseflesh coarsening on her upper arms, unwilling to take the break from her rucksack burden she needed because she was afraid to stop on the exposure of the slope she walked up. She felt exposed herself, vulnerable, almost as though naked. She knew it wasn’t a rational way to feel but she was fighting with every step the instinct just to abandon what she was carrying and turn and flee.
Something man-made loomed into her vision. It was the perimeter wall of Ballantyne’s colony settlement. She’d reached her destination. The realization calmed her. She’d suffered an hour and a half’s sensory deprivation in the mist reaching the spot. Isolation had led to panic, that was all. Fatigue had exacerbated it; she’d been carrying a substantial weight on her back up a steep incline. She’d take out her camping stove and brew some coffee and she’d be absolutely fine, she knew. The practical tasks – choosing a likely spot, pitching her tent – would refocus her thinking and make her feel comfortable and confident again.
She walked its perimeter reluctant to enter the settlement through the breach in its wall in the fog. She would wait until that cleared. She concentrated on finding somewhere flat and offering a degree of protection from the elements. Eventually she chose a place flanked on one side by the wall and opposite that, the edifice of a granite crag. It was quite sheltered for somewhere at that altitude, the crag obstructing the prevailing westerly wind from blowing her tent away in a gale.
The feeling of being watched had returned to her. She erected her tent acutely aware of the sensation, trying to fight the panic blossoming with a hollow bloom of dread in her stomach. So determinedly did she concentrate on the job that it wasn’t until it was accomplished that she noticed the fog was finally lifting. The sky was a pale blue above its thinning grey reach and the sun a pallid orb at about its zenith. It was just before one o’clock.
Georgia ate a power bar and brewed coffee like someone auditioning for her own life; quite unable to shake the feeling that to alert, unseen eyes this was a performance providing a degree of interest or even amusement. She wondered had Baxter’s security people spotted her. They might be filming, surveiling her. It was possible. Except that she didn’t think being the subject of a camera lens would have the effect of making her feel quite as wretched as she did. She felt a powerful sense of foreboding there at the wall, in its bleak shadow now the sun had strengthened and the fog lifted fully.
I’m not going to get the part, she thought. I’m failing this audition.
She had to get a grip. The coffee she’d drunk was a strong one and she could feel the caffeine raise her heart rate and deliver her a febrile sort of energy. She needed to give the moment some sense of purpose to try to shake the groundless suspicions and vague negative instincts she was prey to from overwhelming her. She secured her rucksack in her tent and grabbed her camera and walked around to the breach where its great wooden gate had once been in the settlement wall.
The settlement buildings were silent and still and seemed somehow poised. The hovels squatted and the bigger structures loomed. Roof slates were absent like missing teeth in a grin. Doors were canted oddly against black, lightless interiors. The door to the windowless church was intact, though, balanced on its hinges, a massive oak obstacle that was no barrier at all, because it was unlocked, open a chink, a slit of gloom between the wood and the masonry flanking it.
She opened the door and went inside. She allowed her eyes to adjust from relative brightness to this large and sightless space. There was a figure in one corner, an effigy, she saw. She assumed it was a statue because of its size. Then, in the darkness, its grainy visage cracked as it leered at her and shifted.
Chapter Thirteen
Johnson heard the scream. It rent the still island air for hundreds of metres from its source. He was on the heights when he heard it, halfway up the climbing pitch Edie Chambers had struggled to conquer, roped and sweating with effort, doing what he was as an alternative to the tedium of free-weights and press-ups. He’d been on the face since before the fog lifted. It was more fun than running was when you couldn’t see the view. For the first time in weeks on the island, he’d completely lost himself in the task, until he heard Georgia Tremlett’s scream.
He abseiled down to the base and started to move in the direction from which the scream had come. He thought it ominous that there’d been no repetition. It had been an expression of primal terror and had chilled his blood, but someone that scared went on screaming if they were capable of doing so. They didn’t stop voluntarily. Generally, they wouldn’t stop until the screaming fit had done its therapeutic job and exhausted itself.
He summoned back-up on the shortwave. Ricky Hurst responded, which was good. Ricky had approached him quietly in the compound after the discovery of the R.I. wreckage and confided that he’d brought a few souvenirs back with him into civilian life when he’d left the Royal Marines.
‘Might be out of my mind telling an ex-police officer this, but it’s what the situation requires.’
‘Horses for courses?’
‘Nothing to do with matters equestrian.’
‘No, Ricky. It’s firearms you’re talking about. You’ve got a loaded gun with you here on the island.’
‘Bloody hell, you must’ve been some copper.’
‘I wasn’t the best,’ he’d said, thinking of Commander Lassiter. ‘But I wasn’t bad.’
It turned out Ricky Hurst had a Sig Sauer P224 subcompact semi-auto loaded with 11 9mm rounds. He took the calculated risk of telling Johnson this because he figured matters on New Hope were escalating in a manner that was hazardous and deliberate. He hadn’t worked out the nature of the threat on the island, but he knew it was a hostile environment, didn’t believe Carter and Newton had met their deaths accidentally and thought it highly unlikely that Greg Cody had met with some innocent accident. A couple of the boys were speculating that Greg might have topped himself. Hurst thought the suicide theory stank.
Cody and Hurst had rubbed along pretty well together. They’d both been bike enthusiasts. Men about to kill themselves don’t pay the deposit on a brand new Harley Davidson, as Greg confided he had in Ricky. He’d bought the bike on his last leave, just before his departure from home for the island.
‘Why did you bring the hardware?’
‘I carried a side arm in the field for better than a decade. Feel a bit naked without it to be honest. And it seemed practical. We’re a team of six. Anyone coming here aboard a boat looking to steal plant is going to be organized criminals and they’re going to be tooled-up.’
‘It’s a blatant firearms offence. You make it sound like a sensible precaution.’
Now, approaching the sound of the scream, Johnson saw a distant, approaching, scrambling dot he knew was Ricky Hurst. Johnson would get there first. It would be more comfortable to enter Ballantyne’s stone labyrinth w
ith someone covering his back, but there wasn’t time to wait. The scream had been too urgent.
He reckoned the bigger buildings likelier locations than the hovels. He checked out the distillery and the tannery and the stable where they’d kept their mules. He checked the sheep pen and the schoolroom and found nothing in any of those places.
Hurst had reached him by the time he approached Ballantyne’s windowless church. He’d have just scrambled miles, much of it peat bog, the rest of it uphill, and he wasn’t even breathing hard. He was formidably fit and together they were a handful and one of them was lethally armed. And Johnson didn’t think he had ever been more afraid in his life. And he heard Hurst swallow drily beside him and saw the tremor in the hand holding his pistol and knew they both felt the same way.
Johnson heard himself say, ‘No point both of us falling for it if this is a trap, mate.’
‘Can you use a gun?’
‘Did a twelve month stint in diplomatic protection.’
‘You’re in charge.’
Hurst handed him the pistol. The weight of it felt comforting and familiar in the grip of his right fist.
I’m in charge for now, he thought. He took a breath and opened the door and walked into the gloom with the pistol extended at the end of his arm with the safety off. The interior of the church was absolutely quiet and still. An ocean of blood had been spilled there, if the legend was true. Seamus Ballantyne, in his torment and madness, had resorted in the end to human sacrifice. There was no sign of ritual violence now. There was just a smell, oddly feral, as though something wild had made the place its lair.
He looked around and as his eyes adjusted, the bare walls stared blandly back. It had been done here, his intuition told him. The scream had come through the open door of the church, amplified off these walls. The killing had followed. First, though, the killer had pried open his victim’s mouth and torn a tooth from their gum. From her gum, Johnson reasoned, the screamer had been a woman.
He could look around the floor for the signature incisor in its circle of fresh pink gore, but didn’t think it would have been left there. Logic suggested Carter and Newton’s deaths at sea had been a tragic accident. This latest event would likely be viewed the same way. Certainly there would be no evidence to the contrary. The killer was rationing, carefully, trying with these ambiguous deaths to leave the people behind the New Hope Experience undeterred.
‘Looking forward to the feast,’ he said out loud.
He realized Hurst had entered the church, sensed the man’s tense, muscular presence at his back.
Hurst said, ‘Can you smell that stench?’
‘Yeah, don’t recognize it, though.’
‘Like the bear enclosure at the zoo,’ Hurst said, ‘only stronger.’
Johnson remembered the cracked glass in Helena’s suit. Their killer was a lot more agile than any bear.
‘Any ideas, boss?’
‘Nothing useful,’ Johnson said, ‘except that I don’t want you calling me boss anymore. I’ve got your back and you’ve got mine, Ricky and from now on you call me Derek.’
‘Dave Carter used to call you Deggsy.’
‘I’ll answer to that too.’
Half an hour later, they found Georgia Tremlett’s tent and shortly after finding it, knew who their vanished screamer had been.
Felix Baxter rated Derek Johnson very highly. He thought Johnson’s six-strong team vigilant professionals and all the security needed to guard his infrastructure against theft or vandalism prior to the opening and occupation of the New Hope Experience complex. He didn’t, though, think that a scream amounted to a murder and told Johnson so 20 minutes after his helicopter touched down at lunchtime on Wednesday.
Missing didn’t necessarily mean dead or even injured, Baxter felt obliged to remind Johnson, there with some other guy named Hurst to greet him when he touched down. And dead didn’t always mean unnatural causes. The island had natural hazards aplenty and Professor Tremlett had no right being there unannounced, alone and without a viable means to communicate.
They’d find her or she’d find them, he predicted, as Johnson and Hurst shot glances at one another nervous for two so big, tough-looking men. Carter and Newton was a shame but they’d been foolhardy. It had been a classic case of overconfidence on Newton’s part and he’d paid the ultimate price for his nonchalance about the sea. They’d strayed into a shipping lane and been churned in the night to shark chump by the propellers of a cargo vessel. That wasn’t quite how Baxter put it, but that was what his words clearly implied.
The mood was buoyant at the complex when they reached it, despite Johnson’s gloomy earlier speculation on the lost academic’s fate. A team of contractors was on site replacing the cracked windowpane in the suite Helena Davenport had occupied. They abseiled around the fascia in bright blue overalls with belts busy with alloy carabiners, flashing and chinking in the late winter sunshine.
The pane itself, the new pane, was suspended on belts roped to a pulley on the complex roof. The whole operation looked slick and spectacular and full of positivity and optimism and Baxter watched, sipping an iced beer one of the maintenance crew had known where to look for in one of the big kitchen refrigerators yet to be properly stocked with fresh food for the paying guests.
The job was completed as evening approached. By then Baxter felt exhilarated. The buoyant mood was provoked by spending time touring what he was now confident would come over time to be regarded as Helena Davenport’s masterpiece. The weather was positively spring-like. Easter would soon be upon them and he was determined to open well ahead of schedule. The logistics – the staff and the supplies – could be speeded up by a couple of computer clicks. Everything would kick in smoothly and if it didn’t, any kinks would very soon be ironed out.
The doubts he’d harboured over an uncertain evening at his Manchester penthouse had not proven a match for his natural inclination since then towards positive thinking. The vanishing of Captain Sensible admittedly remained a mystery. Ballantyne’s Breguet too was a puzzle apparently defying the laws of physics. He hadn’t really rationalized the sobering apparition depicted on that Liverpool cinema poster. And he still wouldn’t have let his son come within several deep and briny nautical miles of New Hope Island. But the RI mishap had been an accident waiting to happen, frankly. And Georgia Tremlett was too dowdy a woman for her being listed as missing to provoke much tabloid interest.
Baxter sat down that evening with Georgia Tremlett’s laptop in front of him. He’d ordered it retrieved from her tent as soon as he’d been informed of her disappearance. That wasn’t strictly something the police would approve of in the case of a missing person but he doubted anything in her personal computer files would help anyone find the lost university lecturer any quicker than they were going to anyway.
The optimist in him hoped to find a suicide note written there. If he did, he could have one of his boys stumble on the laptop somewhere less incriminating on the island than the desk he sat at now and alert the police to its existence innocently.
Or he could tamper with the time and date on the machine and forge a suicide note. That was a simple enough thing to do. There was sufficient stuff written by Doctor Tremlett online for him to mimic her writing style. It was just a matter of repeating her favourite phrases and her stock vocabulary in a missive telling the reader that she’d decided to end it all. She was in her early forties. At least, she’d been in her early forties if she was indeed now dead. The positive there, was that she’d never age another day, and you had to look for the positives, didn’t you, in any given situation?
Early middle-age was a tricky time for a woman whose photograph spelled out spinster in the way that Georgia Tremlett’s did. Every successive day was another weary anti-climax. Her social diary was a lonely rebuke. The calendar was a graph describing only the mundane. Old age and isolation were what she’d honestly had to look forward to. It didn’t really amount to much of a life, did it?
He’d looked up her Wikipedia entry guessing that her date of birth would most likely provide her computer password.
‘Bingo,’ he said aloud as he tapped the numbers in and the screen clarified and he saw her icons shape themselves in punctiliously neat rows.
One file in particular caught his eye immediately. He recognized the name, Fortescue. He swallowed. It reminded him of the chest in the museum, of Ballantyne’s permanently unstill pocket watch, of the ragged little apparition studying him afterwards from the framed film poster that managed to erase itself when he went back to it, steeled for a closer look in the drenching rain.
It had been Rachel Ballantyne, hadn’t it? He was unsure of the how, but had become certain of the who it had been when Edith Chambers had finally relented and described her to him. He shivered, though it wasn’t cold where he sat. He took a fortifying swallow of the single malt in the glass at his elbow. And he double-clicked on the Fortescue file.
Professor Philip Fortescue has strayed from his maritime specialism in his researches into the monster he believes lurks on New Hope Island. The creature name Grendel in the epic poem Beowulf is sometimes in its blank verses referred to as the Sea Hag. It can swim. Sea going vessels are not safe from it and the mythology of the oceans is an area Fortescue has spoken about in past years compellingly on television.
But his interest here is personal. He believes Seamus Ballantyne unwittingly bartered into captivity the greatest sorcerer known to West African tribal legend in the time when the practice of magic was at its most potent there. Shaddeh was chained into a stinking slave hold and then demanded he be freed and treated by Captain Ballantyne as the slave-ship master’s equal. Ballantyne’s response was to bring Shaddeh manacled up to the main deck where before his jeering crew and rope-bound to a chair, his hands were severed by cleaver blows and nailed to a mast as a grisly demonstration of the captain’s unquestionable authority.
The Colony Trilogy Page 68