by F. G. Cottam
David Shanks’ ill-fated crofter’s cottage was at the southern apex of the island. Sunlight had been his logic. He had anticipated growing things and the sun shone longest and brightest there. As Blake led their counter-clockwise trudge around New Hope, Napier wondered had shell-shock or battle trauma generally not clouded Shanks’ judgement of his prospects. This place was surely too bleak to endure living on alone.
The sods were soft under Napier’s booted feet. ‘There’s peat here,’ he said, surprised. The sea was to his right. In the darkening light it looked almost purple and gnarled with foam at its crests and altogether gigantic.
‘You don’t like me much, do you?’ Blake said.
Napier thought the suggestion that he might like Captain Bollocks even a tiny little bit totally outrageous. He also thought it wise to keep his own counsel. He needed this job. He had fucked up a lot of jobs in quick succession and badly needed the money from this one, piss- poor as it was.
‘Marines and Paratroopers, Captain,’ Napier said. ‘The rivalry’s a tradition.’
‘That would be Royal Marines,’ Blake said.
Proving my point, Napier thought, you twat. The ground was surprisingly tricky underfoot. It was inconsistent. It was almost shifty in its character, he thought. It betrayed your weight.
‘I don’t give a shit whether you like me or not,’ Blake said. ‘It’s immaterial. Just don’t let the animosity interfere, Napier. Those four jokers we left struggling with the physics of a couple of frame tents back at the camp are about as useless as useless gets. If push comes to shove, watch my back and I’ll watch yours. Okay?’
‘With you all the way on that one, Captain,’ Napier said. And he was. Blake was right. The Sea Sick Four, as they would now remain collectively in his mind, were worse than useless.
It was fully dark now and not really dark at all. The sky was vast, moon and starlight reflected back off the glittering water of the ocean, the land mass relatively flat and so space all around them and this naked, empty exposure illuminated by a sort of monochromatic light.
It was a place like no other he had experienced before. On the skin, with the temperature and wind and salt prick, it felt a bit like parts of Scandinavia he had been to on manoeuvres back in the day. But you were never far from the scent and shade of trees in Norway and he had seen no trees at all so far on New Hope.
They walked. They did so in silence. But the silence felt slightly more companionable than it had. Napier had not exactly bonded with Blake, you did not bond with a man like Captain Bollocks, but their shared contempt for the Sea Sick Four elevated them to a level of shared professionalism and was at least one thing they could get through this particular job without arguing about.
Decisions needed to be made about inept people. Did you try to train them up? Or did you just task them with trivia? These were matters that would need to be discussed and agreed upon.
He could not have said at what point he became aware of the music. It sort of insinuated itself into his mind to the extent where he was almost singing along with it before it consciously impinged upon his hearing, rather than just his thoughts.
He stopped. ‘Hear that?’
Blake stopped in front of him. Napier saw the Captain’s shoulders tense. He was missing his firearm. He was a man who, in civilian life, always would. ‘I don’t hear anything. What is it?’
Maybe it was drifting on the wind from a fishing boat out there, Napier thought. Sound could carry without distortion an improbably long way over the sea. It could travel for a dozen miles with uncanny clarity. But it wasn’t coming from that direction, was it? It was coming from a spot just over a ridge to his left, to landward. And with a feeling of something akin to dread, Napier knew that he recognised the song.
‘Answer me, Napier,’ Blake said, ‘what do you think you can hear?’ His voice was low and urgent.
Napier walked up close to him. ‘Song,’ he murmured, ‘the sound of a human voice. Listen.’
Blake did. Then he shook his head impatiently. Very quietly, he said, ‘It’s your imagination.’
But Napier knew that it wasn’t. ‘I’m a Kate Rusby fan,’ he said.
‘Never heard of her.’
‘She’s a folk singer, the Barnsley Nightingale. Don’t you like music?’
Blake shrugged. ‘Phil Collins,’ he said, ‘a bit of Whitney.’
But what Napier was hearing wasn’t Phil Collins or Whitney. It was a folk ballad. Kate Rusby sang a lot of old ballads and sea shanties. The one Napier recognised now was called The Recruited Collier. It had been written during the Napoleonic Wars. But it wasn’t Kate singing it. It was being sung unaccompanied by a male voice in a sly and insinuating croon from the other side of the ridge. The melody wavered. The voice had a confidential quality that made it unpleasant to listen to. There was a repellent insistence to it as it quietly repeated the chorus.
‘I’ll take a look,’ Napier said. He did not really want to. He had never believed in phantoms. But he dreaded what he might see over the lip of that rise. It was the accent the singer pronounced the phrases in. It was the dialect of a remote time, when the song was still fresh. Napier was sure of it. After the two centuries elapsed since then, he did not think the singer would look fresh at all.
He climbed the tussocks carefully and peered over the edge of the ground and down as the song was snatched away from his ears, at nothing. There was a smell, though. There was just the faintest hint of tobacco. He looked around. The ground seemed undisturbed. Blake came over the ridge and joined him
‘Can you smell anything?’
Blake sniffed the air. ‘Salt,’ he said, ‘peat. If I didn’t know better, soldier, I’d say you’ve been at the bottle.’
‘It’s a long time since I was a soldier,’ Napier said. This was not strictly true, not in years. Chronologically, it was an exaggeration. But there was an emotional truth to it. He had sunk so far in his circumstances and self-esteem that it felt like a long time. He had not been at the bottle, though.And he still trusted his senses. ‘The island is totally uninhabited, right?’
‘Totally,’ Blake said. ‘Nobody has lived here since a crofter fled the place spooked eighty years ago. You know that. You were there for the briefing.’
Napier nodded. He had been there for the briefing. Phil Collins and Whitney, he thought. Christ. And almost certainly Lionel Ritchie and Maria Carey and Celine Dion as well.
The Recruited Collier was a song about a young man pressed into military service when drunk and subsequently brutalised by war, thriving on battle, ever more callous and bloodthirsty as his sweetheart laments his absence and the changes in him. It had been written in a cruel age, when a child could be hanged for stealing a sheep and the penalty for poaching was transportation in the hold of a ship to the other side of the world in chains.
That was the time of New Hope Island, wasn’t it? That was its period, when there had been people here and life and no doubt a bit of occasional singing and carousing.Napier had heard a ghost. He was certain of it. The grass trembled blackly in the breeze under his feet and he heard the night waves crash and tumble on the shore a hundred feet away and he knew he was in a haunted place. He thought of the last line of the song;
As I lie in my cold, cold bed, of the single life I’m weary
Napier shivered. Captain Bollocks treated him to a manly slap on the back.
Napier shivered. Captain Bollocks
Lassiter always tried to get to seven o’clock in the evening before indulging in his first drink of the day. The first drink did not deliver enjoyment. It was many years since he could honestly have claimed that. It brought relief. It answered a need in him. He had a drink problem and admitted it to himself but considered the problem more chronic than acute.
He thought that if he stopped drinking, he might stop functioning. He was sober in the day. Alcohol did not interfere with his intuition or deductive powers. He could not scrape by on his early pension, not without making lifest
yle sacrifices. The practical solution was to continue to indulge. Less and less, though, was he making it to seven o’clock before seeking the relief of that first drink the Irish called the healer.
Everyone had a vice. Everyone concealed a weakness. His years in the Met had taught him nothing, if they had not taught him that. The exception to the rule seemed to be his current employer, Alexander McIntyre.
As far as Lassiter had been able to determine, McIntyre ran his companies in an honest and judicious way. He gave generously to charities. More, he was pro-active in fund raising for a variety of good causes. He was entirely self-made, but had not scrambled over the corpses of business rivals to get to the top. His past and present colleagues and rivals had nothing but good things to say about him.
His marriage had not been a success. Detail was vague, but the union had been childless and if it had been a contented partnership, they would still be together, which they weren’t. The divorce settlement had been undisclosed, but there was no reason to think it had not been typically lavish. He had been single for almost five years. He was not dating anyone. He had not dated anyone in the period since the divorce.
It occurred to Lassiter that McIntyre might be gay. He did not personally consider that a vice. In contrast with many of his former colleagues, he had no strong opinions on the subject of what consenting adults got up to in private. But the business establishment was still a pretty conservative and even macho environment. It might not greatly enhance McIntyre’s public profile to be identified as someone with a sexual preference for other men.
It wasn’t that though, was it? Lassiter was a shrewd judge and he thought over the course of their several meetings he would have intuited that. It was something else. There was something at the core of McIntyre’s life, some governing passion that gave him his energy and focus and was the real reason for this whole New Hope Island project. There was some secret agenda, wasn’t there? Something McIntyre was not coming clean about to the rest of the people involved.
The project made perfect commercial sense. It would deliver the paper new readers. Short term it would build circulation and the new readers sampling the paper for the first time, a proportion of them anyway, might stick with it. It would stick it to their rival titles. It would generate sensational publicity for the man himself. But that wasn’t the whole of it. Lassiter had not got to the bottom of why McIntyre was really doing this and it was a point of pride with him that he did.
These thoughts occupied him on the drive from his flat in Waterloo to the house in West Hampstead where he planned to do something for which McIntyre would probably have sacked him on the spot. But he had been very troubled by the Shanks film. He had not slept well since viewing it a week before. His booze intake had risen substantially just to enable him to get a decent night’s rest which, because it was drink induced, was actually nothing of the sort.
And the flat itself had become sort of accident prone. Lassiter lived the pristine domestic existence of the life-long bachelor. He demanded cleanliness and neatness of his own home environment. His fridge and cooker were spotless. His polished floors shone. There was no dust to finger on the component lids of his expensively assembled audio system. His bathroom still possessed a showroom gleam. And things had started to go wrong.
Taps ran he could not remember having turned on. Twice this had happened at night, robbing him of precious rest. He discovered rogue rings burning away on his gas cooker. Things had gone missing. Books, keys, his mobile and just yesterday, his wallet. He found them again, but not where he thought he might have misplaced them. He didn’t misplace things, he was too meticulous. When he found these objects, it was almost with the suspicion that they had been deliberately hidden.
Lassiter believed that there was more to life than what was concrete. He thought this belief probably contradicted much of the rest of his nature. But he could not ignore the compelling evidence he had seen in his own career. He had been involved in two murder investigations, child killings both, where they had drawn a despairing blank in seeking the evidence to nail the men they strongly suspected were the culprits.
On both occasions they had benefited from some unorthodox assistance. A psychic called Alice Lang had come forward claiming that she could help them in overcoming the obstacle blocking their investigation. She could lead them to evidence that would get them the conviction they were so desperate to achieve.
She was not some elderly crank, some lonely old loser hankering after the spotlight. She was good looking and glamorous, a successful practicing psychiatristwho had only gone to them because her conscience demanded she share information that had simply come to her, arriving uninvited in her mind. If anything, she helped reluctantly, scared of compromising her own professional credentials and reputation.
She had been plausible enough on the first occasion for them to act on the information. On the second occasion, they had needed no convincing. Alice Lang possessed the gift of second-sight. Lassiter knew and trusted her. He did not like the recent disruption afflicting his home. It was why he was on his way now to see her with the Shanks film transferred to DVD in a jewel case on his front passenger seat. He was a man who always wanted answers. This time, though, the need for them seemed to have become both urgent and personal.
Chapter Two
McIntyre never allowed guests to his house to enter his study. It was a room kept locked. He did not even allow his cleaner to dust it. He did that himself. His interest in matters extraterrestrial would have been obvious to anyone examining the room even cursorily. It wasn’t just the books, rows of shelves of them, each one speculating on the possibility of alien life. He subscribed to a number of magazines that discussed and debated the subject. He had framed photographs on the walls of some of the more celebrated UFO sightings. He had framed photos of some that weren’t so celebrated, too. For these, he had paid very handsomely.
The costliest items in the room were not the pictures, though. He had corresponded seriously with two former NASA scientists on the technology of rocketry and the logistics of interplanetary space travel. These men had both been employed in the boom years of the Apollo missions and had plenty to say in their retirement about the real attitude of the men behind the space programme to the possibility of alien life. Far likelier than not, was their conclusion. And there were classified reports, they hinted, to back the likelihood up.
He had questioned what a craft capable of that magnitude of voyage would look like. They offered to build him a model, predicated on the aliens it carried being humanoid.
McIntyre always quietly assumed the aliens would be slightly altered versions of the human being. Humans were the pinnacle of the evolutionary process and he could not imagine the process being so radically different on life-friendly other worlds. The idea of little green men or intelligent creatures built like giant lobsters, the stuff of Dr Who episodes, did not repel him. He just thought the notion absurd.
He was not an Area 51 conspiracy theorist. He had seen the so-called autopsy pictures allegedly taken then and thought them clumsily laughable fakes. Suspicion and paranoia did not inform his belief in aliens. Rather it came from a profound and optimistic belief that mankind had allies in the cosmos as yet unknown to it. He thought that wherever Ballantyne’s pilgrims had been taken to, they had enjoyed a far more comfortable and interesting life than would have been the case on their hostile and isolated lump of Atlantic granite.
In the end, his ex-NASA correspondents had been unable to agree on the fundamentals of the design of an alien spacecraft. And so he had commissioned them both individually to build him a model of one.
He had them in pride of place on his desk in his secret room and he pondered often on their design, wondering which of their contrasting shapes the ship he was destined to see and perhaps even travel on would most closely, between the two, resemble.
The models had cost him a lot of money. They had been a rich man’s extravagance. But he was a rich man, wasn’t he?And
no bauble acquired in his adult life had given him so much pleasure or stimulated his mind so much as those two intricate, beautifully realised, three-dimensional speculations had.
He sat in his study. He looked at the models on his desk. He thought again about the ghoulish apparition of the eyeless girl in the footage shot on New Hope by David Shanks, having just then come to a firm and resolute conclusion about the film.
It had nothing whatever to do with the earlier and greater mystery. It was not connected in any way to the vanishing. Aliens had taken Ballantyne’s pilgrims, he was as sure of that as he was determined to discover the proof.
Shanks had brought that apparition with him to the Island. It had followed him. Unless, that was, he had conjured it there afresh. He’d had an interest in magic, was an occult practitioner. He had been exiled from the Cornish artistic community later in his life for the very same transgression of dabbling in the dark arts. It was probably why he had ended up in County Clare, a western Irish county then so remote and meagrely populated that he could indulge his mischievous appetite for curses and corn dollies without a neighbour to notice or take exception.
The film was genuine. And it was quite a coup to have something genuinely other-worldly captured on celluloid. But it was nothing to do with the New Hope Island vanishing and McIntyre was glad about that. It meant he would have to endure the prospect of viewing that abomination no more. It meant he could forget about it.
He would direct Lassiter to concentrate on Seamus Ballantyne himself. He did not know anything like enough about Ballantyne’s formal education or cultural inclinations. He wanted to know what the probability was of the reformed slave vessel master having kept a diary or journal. If he had, it might be stashed under the ground on New Hope, as he had earlier suspected and half-hoped. Equally, though, could it be under dust on a neglected shelf somewhere at the archive in the Maritime Museum in Liverpool?