‘Your masterpiece is here,’ Fortescue said.
‘It is,’ she said, ‘but I’m not required to live in it.’ She was sad about Derek Johnson, sad and angry and it showed.
‘One more task to fulfill,’ Lassiter said.
‘A promise to keep,’ Helena said, kissing his cheek, stroking the side of his face with her fingertips.
Ruthie smoked, slightly apart from the group, so as not to pollute them. She was thinking about something Rachel Ballantyne, the tormented entity that had once been Rachel Ballantyne, had said to her.
He never told me a story. He never offered me his embrace. A goodnight kiss was precious rare. I believe he loved me.
Phil came over. Gently, he said, ‘Don’t cry, Ruthie. It’s all going to be okay.’
She sniffed. ‘I’m not crying,’ she said, ‘it’s just the rain, wetting my face.’
Lassiter led them through the narrow iron gate and down the stone steps into the sepulchre. Over their coffee, he’d told them what it was he wanted them to do. By the play of his torch beam, Ruthie took out and positioned and lit her candles. Then he switched off the torch.
Fortescue raised no objection, made no comment at all. He was a man well able to differentiate between tears and rain and the candles were quite practical down there. Their flames lit on the still, silent residents of that subterranean place resting eternally in their tattered remnants on their granite shelves.
Helena was first to become aware that she was there. Rachel didn’t announce herself. Helena felt a sudden clutch of dismay grip her innards and she glanced up and saw a pale, bony figure floating frailly a couple of feet above the beaten earth of the ground in the far corner.
Lassiter saw her next. He said, ‘Good evening, Rachel.’
‘I trust you’re here to keep your promise, Mr. Lazziter.’
There was something centuries old in the curl of the vowels and the sawdust coarseness of the voice that made gooseflesh frill on Helena’s arms. She had tried to prepare mentally for this, but knew now that nothing could equip your mind for its fearful affront to the way things ought to be. Her world had lurched, out of kilter. It was all she could do to stay on her feet. She looked at Ruthie, who’d grown as pale as Rachel was. Ruthie managed a smile and winked at her.
‘We’re all here for that,’ Lassiter said. ‘We’re going to sing you a lullaby and you’re going to sleep.’
‘I’ve never been sung a lullaby,’ Rachel said. ‘I’ve never slept.’
Helena couldn’t look away from the little apparition’s face. It was vague and ill-formed, shifting and uncertain, disconcerting because although she floated before them in space, Rachel wasn’t an apparition at all. Somehow, she was real and possessed of a sort of life.
‘You’ll sleep tonight, Rachel,’ Lassiter said. He unbuttoned his coat and shrugged it to the floor. ‘But before you do,’ he said, holding his beckoning arms wide, ‘I’d like to give you your goodnight kiss.’
Helena gasped at the speed at which Rachel tore through space to close the distance. There was a jump-cut abruptness to it that defied physical laws. She thought Rachel would collide with Patrick with an impact that would kill him before he had time even to flinch.
But that didn’t happen. When Rachel got there she stopped and paused and then clung to him and he held her in his arms and then kissed her on the cheek. ‘Sleep well, darling girl,’ he said, stroking the back of her head.
To Ruthie, standing beside her, Edie whispered, ‘And I thought you were brave.’
But when she looked, Edie thought that Ruthie had been crying too hard to hear her.
She lay on a bier Lassiter had carved and planed and hammered together from driftwood after he’d made his promise during his island sojourn but before he’d worked out how to honour it. He was honouring it now.
They formed a circle around her, holding hands. They ignored the whiff of corruption and averted their gaze from her sightless eyes and they sang Rachel Ballantyne lullabies. Feeling and fortitude lent strength to their voices. Their shared ordeal welded them as one into harmony. Love and loyalty sweetened their tone. Together they lulled Rachel, helping her finally meet the great unpaid debt she owed sleep, and she rested. And so she was put to rest.
As death claimed her, her features resolved and clarified for just a moment into those of a pretty little girl, skin porcelain-smooth, brow unblemished, eyes closed blissfully under the curl of her long lashes. And then the skin blackened and was shed and her bones beneath were exposed and rendered themselves with age to grey ash on the bier Patrick Lassiter had built for her.
It wasn’t far off midnight by the time they got back outside. The wind had dropped and the rain had stopped falling. The sky twinkled vastly with pinprick worlds of light.
Ruthie Gillespie wanted to hug Patrick Lassiter, to tell him how brave and thoughtful and compassionate and kind a man he was, but she couldn’t think of words that wouldn’t debase his priceless parting gift to Rachel Ballantyne’s deprived spirit. Because of him, she hadn’t died alone. Because of him, she’d died at peace, contented, having known at last the simple and sublime comfort of human warmth. But Ruthie said none of this.
They walked for a while in silence.
Eventually, Phil Fortescue said, ‘I can’t believe it’s finally over. It is, though. It’s over, for all of us.’
‘It’s not quite over,’ Ruthie said, taking his hand, swinging their arms as they walked down the slope together. ‘There’s a bar open at the complex and there’s still time for a drink.’
‘I’ll second that commotion,’ Edie Chambers said.
Ruthie said, ‘I haven’t noticed one, Helena, but does the complex have a cigarette machine?’
‘I knew I’d forgotten something,’ Helena Davenport said.
Chapter Eighteen
Felix Baxter stood in the light rain and gathered darkness with the scent of brine strong in his nostrils and salt air heady in his lungs. His feet were on the slicked cobbles of the Colony’s old dock and his eyes were on the wood and granite edifice occupying ground higher than he did a few hundred metres inland. Helena Davenport’s masterpiece, even in the prevailing absence of light, looked flawed but magnificent in its wood and granite isolation. Glass provided the flaw; or rather the flaw was imposed by an absence of glass in one of the picture windows giving on to the lightless, and therefore to Baxter unseen suite within.
He was incurious about what had become of the window. Whatever had happened there, he sensed that the missing pane was actually the least of it. His instinct was that something cataclysmic had occurred. It was over now, the cataclysmic event. He was witnessing only its aftermath. He did not yet know whether the outcome had been good for him or bad. The story continued and his part in it wasn’t over. That was all he was really certain about.
His intuition told him that no living thing lurked now in the complex constructed to help fulfil the dream he’d had for this wilderness. But it wasn’t empty, was it? Someone dead waited there for him. He’d recently become a believer in ghosts. He’d done so only reluctantly, but he no longer harboured any doubt about their existence. He was here because he’d been compelled to come. It was his fate and his penance both and neither could be avoided, despite the trepidation he felt at the prospect of entering first that building and then that particular room.
He wondered were the dead ever patient with the living. He doubted they were when antagonised. He thought now it didn’t really do to exploit the dead by warping their true stories in pursuit of personal gain. He’d been guilty of doing that, though. He thought that the least he could do now was to be prompt for the single unearthly appointment he was there only to attend.
He’d taken a flight directly to Stornoway. He’d chartered the aircraft himself, hadn’t wanted Joy or anyone else among his staff to be party to his impromptu travel plans. A great deal had changed for him following the visitation of Elizabeth Burrows to his Manchester penthouse. Humility had nev
er been foremost among his various qualities. He’d been good at false modesty, but had never been truly humbled until his encounter with the deceased postgraduate student. Finding out who it was she’d been in life had been reasonably straightforward and he’d done that himself also. Delegating tasks had always been one of his business strengths. But Lizzie Burrows was personal and there were some things you had no real choice but to do on your own account.
At Stornoway Harbour, he’d been recommended to seek out a young fisherman named Adam Cox. Cox had achieved a degree of notoriety there. He’s done so by ferrying passengers to New Hope Island aboard his smack. Baxter knew that sailors were superstitious, had remembered that fact recalling the TV series the maritime professor Philip Fortescue had fronted on the subject.
In the Stornoway Harbour bars, Baxter encountered a general reluctance to go anywhere near New Hope. A reluctance, it was suggested, only this man Cox seemed to be sometimes immune to. His most recent island passenger was a name on everyone’s lips there because she was Doctor Georgia Tremlett and Dr Tremlett had apparently vanished once she’d got to her unhappy destination. And this had happened only the previous week.
‘Which is precisely why I won’t take you,’ Adam Cox said to him, when he’d finally tracked the man down to the snug of a gloomy pub.
‘How many have you had?’
‘I’m not on the beer, Mister. I’m whiling away a few hours is all. The fishing’s better at night. The stuff in my glass is Diet Pepsi.’
‘Name your price.’
‘You’re not hearing me very well.’
‘I’m Felix Baxter. Does that name not mean anything to you?’
‘It means the New Hope Island Experience. It means deep pockets and even deeper bullshit and I’m thinking more front than Blackpool.’
Baxter laughed. Despite his dire predicament, he had to. He said, ‘I’ll give you a thousand pounds in cash for not much more than a couple of hours of work. Not even work, really, just diesel fuel and your time.’
‘I’ve Doctor Tremlett on my conscience.’
‘New Hope has changed.’
‘New Hope will never change, Mr Baxter, as Doctor Tremlett seems to have discovered to her cost.’
‘Fifteen hundred in used fifties. Come on! You won’t even break sweat.’
‘Oh, yes, I will.’
‘So you’ll take me?’
‘It’s your funeral.’
‘That’s the spirit.’
‘I’m insane, doing this.’
‘You’ve done it before. You’re the man for the job.’
‘I’m greedy and a fool.’
‘Is your boat seaworthy?’
‘Not as seaworthy as she’ll be when I’ve spent your money on her. It’s the reason I’m taking you.’
‘You won’t regret it.’
‘Which is easy to say. Where on New Hope do you want me to put you off?’
It was the third time he’d done it, Cox told Baxter on their voyage. He talked only because he was nervous, Baxter supposed. He’d first ferried someone to New Hope Island 18 months earlier when his passenger had been the Goth children’s author Ruthie Gillespie. She seemed to have made a very big impression on Cox over a relatively short period of time. She was going there, she’d explained to him, only because some friends of hers were in trouble on the island.
In other circumstances, this would have intrigued Felix Baxter. But the circumstances were what they were and he had weightier matters on his mind than Ms Gillespie’s past island jaunt. And by now he knew that mystery was endemic to the place and that New Hope was somewhere good at retaining secrets it seemed not just to covet but to delight in.
I was left alone there.
He recalled Police Commander Patrick Lassiter’s ambiguous statement wondering whether he’d be left alone by Lizzie Burrows; wondering would her ghastly spectre ever leave him alone in his uncertain future and the thought sent a cold shudder of fear through him that had nothing to do with the depthless void under their battered hull or even his bleak speculations on the night rendezvous to come.
‘What’s the matter?’ Cox had said, seeing him shiver, glancing nervously out at the frothing whitecaps on water blackening with the dusk.
And Baxter had merely shrugged, thinking that fifteen hundred quid paid for a bit of trepidation on the part of his boat’s pilot and that he’d rather have his steersman alert on a crossing like this than smugly complacent.
He’d said his final goodbye to Adam Cox and his inflated fee 20 minutes earlier. For the last ten, he’d stood there in the rain and simply looked upward at the complex. Now, his feet moved forward and he began the ascent to the building rumour had it would earn the talented Ms Davenport not just accolades but gongs. Even recently, that thought would have been a source to him both of pleasure and of pride. It would have thrilled through him with a ripple of vicarious achievement. But everything was relative and it was honestly something he didn’t really give a toss about anymore. Everything was a matter of perspective and Felix Baxter knew that his perspective had been changed forever.
The main entrance was slightly and mightily ajar. It meant that their generator had failed and the power was off. A black mark against Ms Davenport’s name, that, except he didn’t really think it was, because he thought it both deliberate and nothing at all to do with bad design or mechanical failure. It meant he’d have to take the stairs to the suite with the missing window. That was okay, though. He was fit enough for that. His gym habit had been long and unbroken. He was familiar with the route because he often eschewed the lift in buildings. The stairs up to the suite were regular and even. He hadn’t relished the thought of getting into the lift, if he was honest with himself. Honesty hadn’t been one of his past characteristics, either, but was becoming so he knew, more and more. Events had obliged him into honesty. Truth had him cornered there.
The stairwell was slightly dank and completely dark and had a sour, subtly feral smell like an animal secretion. It put Baxter vaguely in mind of the wolf enclosure at the zoo. He could smell other fainter things under it. There was old tobacco and candle tallow and musty wool. He remembered the odour that had arisen when he’d unlocked and lifted the lid of that sea chest in the museum in Liverpool about a hundred years ago.
His throat became very dry on his ascent of the flights of steps taking him higher up and with each one he climbed, closer to his destination. He swallowed and stumbled at the same time and almost fell. He’d resisted the temptation to use the torch on his otherwise useless iPhone. It would have seemed glaringly intrusive and perhaps a provocation. His eyes were adjusting to the darkness but doing so only slowly and reluctantly. He thought this because there were sights here he didn’t wish to see. He knew they would confront him anyway. It was why he was there, wasn’t it?
He reached the open door of the windowless suite. There were shifting patches of starlight in the sky between flurries of night cloud he couldn’t properly make out. After the gloom of the stairwell, the suite itself was quite adequately illuminated. Heavy shards of unbreakable glass glimmered broken at the foot of the windowsill. Pictures artfully hung punctuated the walls in dark rectangles. Furniture bulked and loomed, leather and canvas and polished wood, everything still, but poised to Baxter’s mind, rather than properly reposeful.
Chastising thoughts clattered and reeled through his mind then randomly, unbidden. He remembered the venal words with which he’d manipulated poor Greg Cody’s widow. He recalled the masked uneasiness of men who’d stayed on the island too long in his pay, afraid to confess their honest fears to him. He thought about the tavern he’d hoped to build there, tots of grog and sea shanties, the Hope and Glory, hopelessly and ingloriously bogus. He pondered on his long descent into corruption, I know people who know people, Christ, he thought, who seemed long absent from that place. Baxter wondered could you choke on self-disgust.
The tall and imposing figure of Seamus Ballantyne sat still at a desk on a straight-b
acked chair about eight feet from where Baxter stood. His attitude appeared stiffly reproachful. He wore sea boots and a boat cloak and a tri-corner hat made of tarred felt. Its grainy surface gleamed unevenly when he cocked his head in acknowledgement of company. The gesture was alert and not at all friendly.
There was a single peacock feather welded vertically by a smudge of wax to the crown of his hat and a lunar strangeness to his pale, pockmarked skin when light dabbed briefly at his shadowy features. He looked to be in his early 40s, in the prime of life, dead.
His voice, when it emerged from him, had the weight about it of a sledgehammer blow. His home as a sea captain had been the great 18th century northern English port city of Liverpool. But Ballantyne had been a Scot, Baxter realised, thinking, of course he had. When Seamus came to the Hebrides, he’d always been coming home. Perhaps he’d affected an English dialect as master of an English slave vessel. It might have been politic. If so, he wasn’t affecting one now.
‘This place ill-suits your purpose, Mr Baxter. Your scheme here amounts only to desecration. Abandon it.’
Baxter said, ‘Just like that.’
‘You disguise your terror with impertinent japes. Thus does weakness masquerade as strength. It’s a habit ill suits any man who values dignity. Put to me the question you really came here to ask.’
‘I wasn’t sure you’d come.’
‘Yet you know I never left.’
‘That isn’t quite what I meant.’
‘Speak plainly, Sir.’
‘I’m being haunted, Captain Ballantyne. I need to know will it ever stop.’
‘Suddenly my visitor becomes a coward with the courage to admit to his fear. You’re quite the paradox, Mr Baxter.’
Baxter swallowed. ‘I’m a coward. And I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘that’s the truth. I’m even more afraid, though, for my son.’
The captain chuckled. ‘She’s threatened to visit your son?’
‘She has,’ Baxter said. ‘I would do anything, give everything I possess, to prevent that from happening.’
The Colony Trilogy Page 74