‘I wouldn’t worry,’ said Ernest. ‘I shouldn’t think he and Baskerville will manage to work together for long.’ He winked at Colombo. ‘I thought Tidesman did a good piece on the Pele Centre, about that time Olly predicted a major eruption, had all the children sent home at dinner time, told the government to declare a state of emergency, and it turned out to be a small thunderstorm. I seem to remember Tidesman was quite gleeful in the way he covered that.’
Colombo didn’t smile. ‘But what I want to know is, why does the government still give him grants all the time, and acquiesce in him having a complete monopoly? It’s not just immoral. It’s downright dangerous. You know Olly had Allardyce working there? – Allardyce came back from Japan specially, gave up his job and everything – well Allardyce couldn’t stay at the Pele Centre. He said West just dashes off to the beach all the time to build his breakwaters, and never delegates anything – never tells anyone what’s going on. And there’s Allardyce, who’s worked everywhere from Mauna Loa to Myvatn, having to ask if he can have ten and sixpence out of the petty cash to buy a new stapler. That’s what he resigned over. And all this low-tech monitoring – sure it’s a good idea, but Olly cribbed all that from the Cascades Volcano Laboratory at Mount St Helen’s. Does he acknowledge his sources? Does he hell! What I want to know is, how the hell did West get government funding in the first place?’
‘Because he proposed the volcano observatory,’ said Ernest. ‘You know that. We needed a monitoring system, and he came up with the plans. No one else did. We’ve been over all this before. The young lady’s glass is empty, Colombo.’
Colombo looked round at me and grinned suddenly. ‘I’m sorry, I forgot about you. Will you have another, and then I’ll take you back to town?’
SIX
A NEW FIFTEEN-FOOT Boston whaler lay to the west of Despair. The nesting season was at its height. There were puffins at the top of the cliffs, fulmars and kittiwakes lined the ledges, and right down at the sea’s edge a rock full of black cormorants was washed by a gentle swell. Air and water were full of birds, their calls echoing to and fro between the rocks. Down in the boat, tossing about under the crowded lime-streaked cliffs, it was hard to make oneself heard, hard even to think.
It was the first really hot day, and Jared’s wetsuit felt heavy and uncomfortable, in spite of the offshore breeze. He fastened his weight belt, and waited while Ishmael finished struggling into the bottom half of his suit. It was still early in the season, and the sea was as cold as it had been two months ago. It was more cramped than usual doing everything at sea with an extra person in the boat. If they were to do this job seriously there was no getting away from the fact that they had to have a proper divers’ boat. Per was in the stern at the tiller, and today they’d brought along the photographer as well. Jared didn’t really see the point of taking photos on the surface: all the interesting work was below, but he hadn’t objected. Bringing Nesta Kirwan today might end up getting them the publicity they needed. It was worth the inconvenience of having her along, and she wasn’t being at all demanding. She sat in the bows with her camera, small and self-contained, her equipment neatly stowed in a waterproof black bag. She’d taken several pictures on the way out from Ferdy’s Landing but she hadn’t asked anyone to do anything out of the ordinary. Jared had said rather ungraciously, when he’d called her from Ishmael’s office, that they’d have no time to make any detours, or pose for her, or anything like that. He’d had an idea she was laughing at him then, at the other end of the line, but certainly since she’d joined them this morning she hadn’t got in anyone’s way at all. As it happened, in the end she’d got him to agree to all the detours she wanted, but he was scarcely aware of having been persuaded.
While they were getting ready she took several more pictures, and remarked that Jared and Ishmael complemented each other nicely. ‘One black, one white, do you mean?’ said Ishmael. ‘Or one old, one young? Or are you just saying I look like a sensible man?’
‘You don’t look in the least old, and I’m sure Jared has his own kind of sense.’
‘Forty this year,’ said Ishmael. ‘Maybe you’d do better to keep your film for the wee white fellow.’
‘Huh,’ said Jared.
Ishmael strapped on his belt and reached for his tank, and Jared heaved his own vest and tank over his head on to his back. As he was checking his regulator hoses a kittiwake with a fish screamed over him and suddenly his suit was spattered with fresh guano. Ishmael said something he didn’t catch. Jared looked up, and grinned, and Kirwan clicked the shutter. ‘Christ,’ Jared said, buckling his vest, ‘I feel like a bloody film star.’ She laughed at him, and lowered her camera.
The tank was heavy on his back. He caught the line from the regulator on the top of the tank, and said to Kirwan just before he put in the mouthpiece, ‘OK then? We’ll be half an hour. Nothing else before we go?’ She shook her head and smiled at him.
Jared slithered from the seat to the gunwale, awkward with the extra weight he was carrying. He strapped the finds bag to his belt, and put on his fins. Ishmael, on the port side, was doing the same. Jared spat in his mask, rubbed it round and washed it out in the sea behind him. He’d forgotten he was having his picture taken; his mind was already ninety-two feet down. Ishmael picked up his underwater camera from the bottom of the boat, and hung it carefully round his neck, under the regulator hoses. His movements were slower than Jared’s, deliberate and careful. He inserted his mouthpiece and washed out his mask, and finally gave Jared a thumbs up sign: ‘ready’. Jared thumbed back to him, held on his mask with one hand, and flipped neatly backwards over the side.
As soon as the sound of the splash had cleared he could hear the slow echo of the ocean moving rhythmically against the foundations of Despair. He kicked down out of the surface current and into still water. As he breathed in, he could hear his own breath like the sea itself inside his head, then the rich gurgling sound as he breathed out, and the bright shapes of the bubbles going up in a shoal in front of his mask. His suit pressed in on him as he dropped head down for the bottom. The water began to seep in, cold at first, crawling over his skin like little fingers. It was always chilly here from the upwelling under the cliff. The water grew dim. In front of his eyes it was dark green, framed by the black edge of the mask. Fishes flickered past like shadows, a shoal parting round him like water round a rock in the river, then flowing on. Jared switched on his torch and swam cautiously into the dark, while his eyes adjusted. The blackness ahead was the cliff, the hidden roots of the island of Despair. A jagged promontory ran westward then plunged into deep water. Jared turned and peered upwards into the filtered sea-green light.
The vague light up above turned into a shadow, turned into a moving shape, turned into Ishmael, swam right up, and signed to him.
OK?
OK.
Over the spine of the promontory that coiled away into the dark like a dragon’s back. Over the black rock shapes that lumped themselves around the skerry hidden up above, down into a shadowed gorge that opened out into a hidden pocket of clear water. Below them was the hollow with the patch of shell sand at one end, intersected with steel grid posts. There were the green encrusted shapes of the cannon spilled among the rocks. And there right at the back of the hollow was the one square of grid in place around the sample excavation site. Jared had decided to start with an area that took both the edge of the shell sand, and part of one of the seaweed-covered lava fissures that led down into it. They swam down over it, the beams from two torches piercing the water a little way ahead. It was complex work to do under water, head down. To Jared it was a far more delicate art than excavation on land, which he’d tried when he was at college, and found clumsy. On land your whole body got in the way, messing up the site, and you had to scrape your way laboriously into the past. Here you could hover over the wreck like an industrious spirit, without even touching: a gentle fanning motion would shift the soft sand aside. But it was harder to concentrate, and time
was limited.
Per took out his pipe and tobacco pouch and began to fill the pipe methodically, pressing the tobacco down in neat layers with his thumb. He turned his back to the breeze and cupped his hands around the lighter, more out of habit than necessity, for there was hardly a whiff of a wind. There was a short choppy swell, however, which sent occasional handfuls of spray over the seaward side of the boat. Per moved over to the dry side and sat on the gunwale. Nesta, who found it harder to ignore the uncomfortable tossing, took her mind off it by taking several close-up portraits of him. He pretended not to notice. Very high up in the northwest little streaks of cloud were forming; otherwise the sky was as blue as milkwort above the circling birds. The sea was strewn with feathers, and the smell of the birds wafted down to them from the shadowed cliffs. ‘It’s a day and a bit,’ said Per.
‘It certainly is,’ said Kirwan. ‘You’ve never gone down diving, Per?’
‘Not me,’ said Per. ‘Not but what I wouldn’t like to see the Cortes where she lies. I never learned to swim. Too late now.’
‘It’s never too late,’ said Kirwan firmly as she screwed on a different filter. ‘If the project goes ahead, though, you’ll go on working with them?’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Per. ‘He knows his stuff, young Jared. And Ishmael’s a good man to work with. Always was.’
‘You’ve worked with him before?’
‘I crewed for him sometimes after Jared went away, before he got full time into this computer thing. And I helped him with the old house at Ferdy’s Landing. You’ve not been in there since he did it up?’
‘Only in the kitchen.’
‘You should look around next time you’re there. It’s a pleasure to see now, all new timber and fresh paint, and clean inside as a scoured out washtub.’
‘I can believe that.’ Kirwan was unlikely to ask Ishmael for a tour of his house. She liked the Pereiras, but found their family life so thoroughly exemplary that she always went away feeling depressed. She said as much to Per, who disagreed. He told her that he and Ishmael had both been elders of the Lyonsness Presbyterian Congregation since 1985, and he’d never known Ishmael to be judgmental about anybody. Also, the house at Ferdy’s Landing was the only place he, Per, would ever eat dinner away from his own home. The food was good but sometimes a bit fancy, he said, no doubt because Anna Pereira was the granddaughter of Greek immigrants who’d disembarked on impulse in Hy Brasil, on their way to Ellis Island back before the First World War. Apparently from their ship the resinscented hills above Dorrado had reminded them of their own Sporades. But the three girls took after Ishmael. If you went down to Ferdy’s landing any time when school was out you’d find them down by the shore, each with a cloud of wild hair, patched jeans and muddy boots, always with their hands dirty and some new project on hand. Ishmael’s children were lucky, though, to belong to a family, in these degenerate days, which was all that a family should be.
‘Thank God I never had children,’ said Kirwan. ‘I’m sure no one would have said that mine were lucky, in that case.’
The sand gleamed white in the torchlight, and as Jared fanned the water it shifted into new wave-like patterns. He suspected he was about a yard out of radius of the wreck itself, south-west of the wood from the hull. Maybe this way there’d be nothing more. He glanced at his watch. Ten minutes gone. He was almost up to the grid boundary. Just time to work right into the corner, confirm that it was off-site. Jared stirred the sand a little harder.
Something dark. A curved edge. Not iron. Not rusted. Experienced as he was, he almost held his breath, and had to remember not to. Very gently he washed the sand away. A regular curve began to emerge, like part of a circle. He touched it with his finger. Slippery-smooth: too smooth for stone, or clay. Fluted, like a shell. He fanned the water just enough to brush away the sand. A half-circle now, about three inches across. Black in this light, but that meant nothing. Smooth and flat on one side, fluted on the other, rising into a tight ring. A ring, then something more. A curved shape: a bowl, a cup maybe. It wasn’t clay or pewter. Glass? The sand was very loose. Glass, if it had been flung overboard into deep water at first impact, could possibly have drifted down and sunk slowly into its soft bed, so much safer than ashore. Safe for nearly four hundred years. There was a whole outline now. It took on meaning. A glass bowl with straight sides, a wide circular rim, and a thick ring at the bottom, mounted on a fluted base. Unbroken, so far. Such things had happened: whole shiploads of ancient amphorae right through to bone china from the Titanic, the most fragile artefacts surviving whole when iron and bone had disintegrated and gone back to nothing. He fanned the sand away. The goblet lay, whole and lovely, just as it had fallen, untouched by time or tempest.
There was a touch on his shoulder, and he looked round. Jared couldn’t see Ishmael’s face, but he could read his reaction from his sudden stillness. Then Ishmael pointed to his camera. Jared wriggled back as far as he could go, out of the way, until his tanks bumped against rock. Ishmael swam forward, head down, until the lens was about a foot away from the find. A muted flash followed. Then another.
Move round. I’ll take one from where you are.
Jared slipped over Ishmael’s head, and looked down from above as Ishmael adjusted the focus. Another flash.
Ishmael put away his camera and tapped his watch. Five minutes.
I’m going to make a record. Then I can lift it.
Not much time.
OK.
Jared took his plastic notepad and a pencil from his belt, and an ordinary plastic ruler. He swam down and measured. Six and a quarter inches from one edge of the grid. Thirteen and a half from the other edge. He did a quick sketch, and tucked it away.
Be quick.
OK.
He looked down on it one more time, spotlighted by his torch. Untouched and perfect, caught out of time, untrammelled by the sea. A black shape on white sand. It would never look like that again. Very carefully he reached down with both hands, and lifted it.
He swam up slowly, the goblet in the finds bag. The sea turned greener and brighter, and gradually light surrounded him. Then everything was white and birds were screaming. The swell jumped at him, splashing water in his face. He held on to the goblet inside its bag, to stop it being bashed against his weight belt. Then he trod water and looked, and there was the boat fifteen yards away, with Ishmael in between. Jared spat out the mouthpiece and breathed deep, put in the snorkel, and swam back to the boat.
‘Of course,’ said Per, ‘When you think about young Jared, he wasn’t so lucky either.’
‘I liked Josie Honeyman,’ said Kirwan. ‘She managed as well as anyone could. It must have been hell.’
‘A boy needs a father, and Jed didn’t have one, not when it mattered.’ Per breathed out a cloud of tobacco. There was a scuffle in the water a few feet away: a drowning puffin fighting for its life against a black-back. If young Jared wanted to do something useful up at the lighthouse he’d be out shooting some of those things. Counting gannets for a living was maybe as much use as most things in this world. It seemed a harmless ploy for the lad while he sorted out whatever was on his mind. Seemingly he’d got his education while he was abroad, and to his credit he’d done all that work up in Arctic waters. Diving for your living north of 60˚ was no joke. And now he was daft about this salvage business. Per had been reluctant when Jared asked him to join them as boatman, but he was getting drawn into the thing. Like every other boy in Hy Brasil Per had once had his own secret dream of finding Kidd’s treasure. Well, no one ever had, and it was fifty years since he’d even thought of it, but when Jed came round and talked him into this new venture, he’d had to admit to himself he’d felt a flicker of the old flame.
‘It’s a pretty dangerous job, though, isn’t it?’ said Nesta. ‘Though not so bad as mountaineering, I suppose. But if you’re not attacked by a shark you’ll probably get the bends – isn’t that it? – and if it were me I’d be nervous all the time about not being able to bre
athe.’
‘I reckon they have more trouble with jellyfish than sharks, though Jed did tell me what you do if a shark does attack you. And the other thing is OK at this depth if they come up slowly. If there were any trouble the Coastguards have one of those decompression chambers down at Port o’ Frisland. Ten years ago the nearest one would be fourteen hundred miles or so away, which is maybe a bit too far if you were in a hurry.’
‘God,’ said Nesta. ‘It sounds awful. And the sea, to my eyes, does not look enticing.’
Per took a long puff on his pipe. ‘We’ve been out here on days a good deal worse than this,’ he said. ‘But Jed’s all right. He’s careful, and if things look like going wrong he thinks clearly. You might not guess it, if you’d never worked with him. But you can trust him.’
‘I remember he was pretty wild in his teens.’
‘That’s by with,’ said Per shortly. ‘He always wanted a boat. When he was a little lad his Pappa used to take him out, putting crab pots off Brentness. If there hadn’t been that business with Jack … I didn’t believe a word of it then, and still less do I believe it now. Even if I did, what’s a British agent anyway? The old word was Loyalist. I can think of at least two houses where they still have a portrait of the Queen on the wall. Jack never cheated anyone in his life, and that’s a fact.’
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