“No unpleasantness!” Korochenko said, turning away from Dan. “Just a goodwill gesture. You repay me half my money.”
Nisbet turned puce and reeled back. He looked as if he might faint. His mouth opened but a faint choking noise was all he managed to produce.
Korochenko walked up to Nisbet, reached up with a meaty hand, and adjusted the Englishman's tie. It hadn’t needed adjusting, Dan noted.
“You agree?” purred the oligarch. “Good! And you do not have to fire this foxy Yankee fellow. But perhaps you keep him on shorter leash, yes? He is very clever, okay, smart is good – but I think he is maybe bad for your fine old business. Reputation is so important when gentlemen are making deals, yes?”
Nisbet squeaked again, nodded energetically.
“Crap, Dan,” said Melinda, walking over to her former lover. “Is this a typical day at the office?”
“Jesus Christ, leave me alone!” Dan shouted before he could stop himself.
Korochenko looked at Dan, his face finally losing its silky smile.
“I think this American is not a gentleman, James. Such rudeness! In the old days, this would have been grounds for a duel in your country, yes? And in mine. Oh no, I forgot. Only gentlemen fought duels, was that not so?”
Korochenko walked toward Dan again, and passed right through Melinda. The ghost shimmered, almost disappeared, then resumed her apparent solidity with a grimace. Dan reeled back as Korochenko reached out. Dan slapped the Russian's hand away before he realized that the other man had intended a handshake. Korochenko's low, bushy brows drew together.
“I don't think you take me seriously, Mister Fox,” he growled. “You will regret this.”
Dan began to stammer out an apology, but the Russian was already leaving. As the door closed gently, Nisbet slumped into the visitor's chair, took out a silk handkerchief and began to mop his gleaming forehead.
“Oh Jesus, oh God,” Nisbet moaned. “The things he said he would do. I'm not even sure what a wood-chipper is. I don't want to find out!”
Dan tried to focus on the problem, sidestepping Melinda so he could stand over his boss.
“He's just a thug, James,” he insisted. “This is England, he can't make threats like that. Call the goddamn police!”
Nisbet looked up, jaw slack. Then he laughed, jowly chin wobbling.
“Oh, of course,” he said. “That's all we need, a reputation among the oligarchs for informing on them.”
Dan cursed, but knew his boss was right for once. They had to refund Korochenko's money or risk reprisals. And if half the money went back, so did half of Dan's commission on the sale. It was a big financial hit.
“Okay,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “Okay, you pay him the money. No other option. But it might encourage his pals to make similar demands.”
“Don't you think I'm aware of that you wanker!” Nisbet shouted, jumping to his feet. “It's about time I sold this bloody business and went to live in Belize or wherever.”
“Your boss guy seems kind of pissed, Dan,” said Melinda, standing at Nisbet's shoulder. “Your next appraisal is gonna be a doozy!”
“Oh for God's sake–”
Dan caught himself before he could tell her to shut up and thus upset Nisbet even more. He changed his tone, and tried to sound conciliatory.
“James, I can make up the loss real fast, for me and the firm,” he said. “But you could avoid this kind of problem if I had access to this old boy network you upper-crust types take for granted.”
Melinda gave a smiling thumbs-up at that. Dan moved a few paces sideways to try and get her out of his field of view, but she simply moved too. She wagged a reproving finger at him. He tried to focus on a spot just above the bridge of Nisbet's nose.
“What are you talking about?” Nisbet demanded, his ruddy features contorted by resentment and suspicion.
“Yesterday I went to see a little place in Salisbury Square,” said Dan. “Seems you’re a member of this gentleman's club poor Tim Burdus was trying to get into, right? Guess you put his name forward?”
Nisbet looked nervous and Dan did not need an answer.
“Now, James,” he went on. “Wouldn't it be awkward if poor Tim's family, and friends, started asking questions? ”Nisbet looked scared, so frightened in fact that Dan was taken aback. He glanced over at Melinda, and she mouthed 'Go for it!' She added a double thumbs up gesture. He remembered her doing that one night when he had tried to do a karaoke version of Santana's 'She's Not There'.
I'm going crazy, he thought. I'm relying on a hallucination for moral support.
“You don't want to upset the Inner – the club, Dan,” said Nisbet. His voice took on a pleading tone. “Seriously, they are worse than Korochenko and his kind. If I could leave, I would.”
Suddenly the Englishman sagged like a leaky balloon. He sank into the visitor's chair. Melinda leaned over to Dan Nisbet, then looked up at Dan.
“He's on the ropes!” she said cheerfully. “Get stuck in, mate, as the locals say!”
“Okay,” said Dan, in a lower voice. “All I want is what you gave Tim – a chance to join the Mephisto Club. Is that so hard?”
Nisbet looked up.
“Don't go there, I'm begging you.”
Dan shook his head.
“Just put my name forward, tell the membership board or whatever that I'm a great guy.”
Nisbet shook his head. Melinda squatted beside him and began to mimic sticking her tongue in his ear while crossing her eyes.
“They'll give you an especially difficult … task,” Nisbet said carefully. “You see, you have to prove yourself worthy.”
Enlightenment dawned, like a sunrise in Dan's mind.
“I get it now! It's like some fancy British frat house – Tim was kind of a pledge, right? And he screwed up? Poor kid.”
Nisbet looked baffled and irritated.
“No idea what a frat house is,” he said. “I do know that they make you perform at least one task, and there's always an element of risk. And they know if you try to cheat, believe me.”
“You got caught, eh?” Dan said, with grim satisfaction.
Nisbet nodded, looking suitably shamefaced.
“They set me a fairly simple challenge, by their standards, but–”
Nisbet held out his hands in a helpless gesture.
“Don't do it, Dan! If it hadn't been for my dad's influence I don't know what would have happened to me.”
Dan decided that he would not leave until Nisbet had made the call. He took a step closer so he could loom over the flabby man.
“Look, James, any challenge you mastered doesn't scare me. I want that membership. I'm living in a crappy little apartment in a run-down part of this city because I'm saving every penny I can. If your fancy club can get me a few years closer to my own dealership I will go to hell and back.”
Nisbet looked up at Dan, gave a wan smile.
“Oh, you probably will,” he said. “But have it your way. I'll do it.”
“Now,” Dan insisted. “Please.”
Nisbet laughed, then. It was a hollow, mirthless sound.
“That's not how it works,” he said. “They don't use technology that can be tapped. They're awfully careful about that sort of thing.”
Dan began to protest but Nisbet shook his head and stood up.
“You want to be in the club, Dan? Then you play by their rules, all the way. Now go and do some actual work, old chap. Enjoy normality … while you still can.”
Dan snorted in contempt, but short of physical threats, could think of nothing else to do. Before he turned to leave, he glanced around the room.
Melinda had vanished without him noticing exactly how.
Good, he thought as he closed Nisbet's door behind him. Maybe that's the end of these hallucinations.
***
Malahide prepared for the Sunday morning service in his usual way, except for dealing with the weird crucifix. He had to force himself to pick it up,
still wrapped in the checkered tea-towel, and take it into the church. He placed it carefully on the communion table, and only then noticed that the pattern of seashells drew the eyes to the shining cross.
Somebody's creative, he thought. Not Father Hackett, I'm sure. Maybe Moira Bell?
Any speculation on the matter ended when he unlocked the church door and found a long line of islanders standing patiently outside. Moira was, predictably, at the head of the queue. Malahide was taken aback. Normally congregants trickled in as the clock ticked toward the hour. For the first time, he was confronted by what seemed to be genuine religious enthusiasm.
“Welcome, God bless you,” he said, stepping back to let Moira in.
“Thank you, Father,” the woman replied, and gave him a familiar little pat on the shoulder.
“Morning, Father,” said the next person in line, and the islanders filed in, all smiling, polite, but still with that hint of watchfulness, still reserved. Malahide went back to the table and waited for his flock to settle.
Okay, Michael, this is it – give it the Full Monty.
The service went reasonably well. His sermon was a short meditation on the subject of strangers coming among the godly, which seemed to go down well. Malahide wondered if the congregation's attentiveness was down to the fact that the island had no cell coverage, so nobody could look at their phone.
Or maybe they're just old-fashioned polite. Either's good I suppose.
It was only during Holy Communion that things went slightly awry. The first few communicants who came up seemed slightly amused by the whole thing, giving each other little sideways smiles. And when a young girl was brought forward by her mother, Malahide had a genuine shock. He reached out to put the wafer on the girl's tongue, and the latter shot out like a lizard's and seemed to snatch the small disc from his fingers. The priest flinched slightly, and heard a quickly-suppressed titter run through the onlookers.
I'm the new guy, he told himself. Of course, they're expecting me to make a knob of myself.
After the service, he took his usual place at the door and bade his flock goodbye. Moira made a point of standing at his elbow introducing each islander. Predictably, Malahide struggled to remember names, as so many of the locals seemed to have the same first names. There were a lot of Dougals, a few Anguses, and far too many Marys, Maries, and Moiras. The surnames weren't much help, as the islanders all tended to belong to one of a handful of extended clans. MacPherson, Gordon, and Campbell were most numerous.
“That went well,” said Moira, after Malahide had bade the last of the Dougals goodbye. “Well done, Father!”
“I suppose so,” he replied, trying not to be annoyed at her attitude.
One of those ladies who likes to manage the priest, he thought. Bane of my life. Oh well.
“Well,” she went on, “you'll be wanting to get on. I'll see you this evening.”
“Yes,” he replied, with fake bonhomie, “yes, you will.”
Malahide returned to the priest's house and poured himself a drink. He stood looking out of the living room window over Soray town. It was still picturesque, still quiet, but he somehow could not bring himself to like it. Shrugging, he downed his Scotch in a gulp and went to sort out some more of the parish's tangled affairs.
It was while he was rummaging through a box of dog-eared prayer books that he found the journal. When he opened it, he recognized the writing as Father Hackett's. As he flicked through, Malahide realized it was a diary that the priest had begun to keep when he arrived on Soray, in 1989. But it seemed that Hackett had given up recording his thoughts and activities after a few months.
“Wonder why?”
Malahide leaned back on the kitchen chair and began to study Hackett's journal more closely. The priest's handwriting was neat at first, and it was easy to make out the initial entries. He had arrived in April, and was optimistic about his new parish. The only reservation, Hackett had written, was 'the inevitable managing woman' who tried to run things on his behalf. Malahide turned a couple more pages and a name caught his eye.
Mrs. Bell.
Malahide sat up, disconcerted by the coincidence. Then he laughed at his foolishness.
Of course, this Moira Bell's mother was the parish busybody before her. Or more likely her grandma.
Malahide forgot his other tasks as he became absorbed by the young Father Hackett's account of his settling-in period. Bright at first, the feel of the diary grew slowly darker, more confused, and the entries shorter and more fragmentary. Hackett's handwriting deteriorated too. By the autumn, whole weeks were left blank. Then came a few pages filled with writing that, Malahide realized, did not relate to any particular day but were just an outpouring of Hackett's thoughts.
Dark thoughts they were, too, he mused. Hard to make out but he was not a happy bunny.
Malahide soon gave up on making sense of it and instead struggled to decipher words and phrases. One thing was clear. Hackett had had a crisis of faith and struggled against some unspecified temptation.
But what? Moira Bell's randy granny? Or just the local rotgut? Or maybe it was finding himself isolated in such a close-knit community? Did sheer loneliness turn a high-functioning alcoholic to a low-functioning one?
The term 'mural' cropped up, along with what might have been 'blasphemous'. There was a recurrence of the strange word 'Sidhe', which was vaguely familiar. Malahide could not remember where he had heard it before. Not for the first time he cursed the lack of internet on Soray.
But Hackett was Irish, he recalled, and the word seems Gaelic.
Another baffling term that recurred several times was 'the Ones Below'. Who they might be was never made clear. Towards the end of Hackett's stream of consciousness, there were frequent mentions of 'merging' and 'offerings'. The vagueness was frustrating and again Malahide felt himself favoring the 'crazy old drunk' theory. The last page was scored deep with four words.
I WILL NOT YIELD.
“Bonkers,” said Malahide. “But why did nobody spot the problem?”
Hackett, like all priests in these island parishes, must have had their confessions heard by another priest. That meant voyaging to the mainland on a regular basis. The old man must have also spoken to his superiors, been updated on diocesan matters. It was routine procedure. Which tended to support the high-functioning alcoholic idea.
And if he did go barmy in his first few months, how did he end up staying for decades? What changed?
The young priest stood up and took the journal to the kitchen window. The vista of Soray town against the backdrop of the Atlantic was still picturesque. But the glowing image of the strange crucifix swam into his mind, and in turn conjured up in its turn the girl's tongue darting out under the wafer. But there was something else, something he could not quite recall. Something about the church.
He put the journal down on the kitchen table and went outside. There was nobody within sight, and the only sound was the breeze in the gorse and the distant cry of sea birds. Malahide went around to the church and stood inside the open doorway, letting his mind go blank. It was a tried technique, allowing an elusive fact float up into his consciousness.
The door. It's something to do with the door.
Malahide closed the door and examined it. The inside of the hefty wooden slab was darker around the latch, reflecting many years of usage. But there was nothing special about it. Frustrated, he opened the door again to look at the outside and it banged back against the wall. There was, he realized, nothing to stop it hitting the wall.
Mrs. Bell's skills don't extend to DIY, he thought, examining the area of impact. Some of the whitewash had been scraped off. Malahide frowned, unsure of what he was seeing. Then he began to pick away at the whitewash with his fingers, trying to remove a few square inches.
Logically there should be a just a layer of plain plaster, but–
The plaster was not plain. It was painted. All he could see was a blue-green area.
So somebody painted
the interior turquoise, then somebody else whitewashed it.
A shadow moved across one of the church windows. It might have been a gull flying past. Or someone moving very quickly around the church, away from the priest's residence. Malahide flung the door open again and saw Moira Bell walking toward him with her basket.
“Just brought you a little something for your tea, Father,” she said. “Just a little fish pie. And do you like Victoria sponge cake?”
“Lovely,” he said, not having to feign enthusiasm. “Will I take it for you?”
He felt a sudden urge not to let the woman into his kitchen, where Hackett's diary was lying on the table. He took the basket and walked her around the church to the house.
“It's a fine building,” he said, looking up at the tower. “How did a small fishing community afford such a thing? It's what, five hundred years old?”
“A little more than that,” she replied, with her familiar smile. “As for how they paid for it, well, they had a stroke of luck.”
“Divine intervention, perhaps?” Malahide asked, half-seriously. “The Lord will provide and all that?”
“You might say that,” she said. “But there's more than one kind of providence, you know.”
Chapter 4: Challenge and Response
Dan worked hard for the rest of the week, spending most of his time out of the office. He barely glimpsed Nisbet, and heard nothing about his application to the club. He also had no more visions of Melinda, which gave him some relief. However, by Friday afternoon he was determined to confront Nisbet and demand results.
As he entered the reception, Lisa was back to her usual ebullient self. She was telling one of the other dealers about her new boyfriend, who had some kind of yacht, apparently. Smiling to himself, Dan wondered how long this infatuation would last, and gave her a wave before knocking on Nisbet's door.
“Enter.”
The Englishman's voice was quieter than usual, and when Dan obeyed, he saw a man who still seemed deflated. Nisbet's face, normally ruddy, had become gray. The folds of his neck seemed looser under his weak chin. Before Dan could speak, Nisbet got up and took a slip of paper out of his pocket.
Dark Waters (Mephisto Club Series Book 1) Page 5