by F. G. Cottam
He knew that the logical thing to have done at this point would be to charge a historian with the mission of finding it. But it was essentially detective work, wasn’t it? And Lassiter had been a bloody good copper. And Lassiter, handsomely paid, did not have a historian’s fastidious scruples when it came to appropriating sources. If he found something of interest and value to the man paying his wages he would lift it, without quibble.
McIntyre did have one urgent dilemma to confront. It concerned exclusivity. His instinct told him that the paper and the health of the paper should really be the main beneficiary of the New Hope expedition. Circulation had fallen. The stature of newspapers as breakers of news had been undermined by the internet perhaps, in the long run, fatally. The paper’s website scored considerably more hits than copies sold and his company’s web ventures were increasingly important sources of revenue stream and bottom line profit.
Logic suggested two possibilities. One was to set up live webcam newsfeeds and dedicate a substantial section of the paper’s website to the moment by moment progress of the expedition. His marketing experts had said the increase in traffic was likely to be exponential. The other tactic would be to launch a dedicated website concentrating wholly on the expedition and its findings. The marketing people were very enthusiastic about that option because it dispensed with any confusion, always a good thing faced with the limited attention spans and intellect of the average web surfer.
McIntyre planned to implement neither internet option. The paper would get this story as a genuine, old fashioned rolling exclusive. He had been advised by his own web people that no one was prepared in the modern age to wait for 24 hours for a news update. The download culture demanded it now, at the click of a mouse or use of an app on an internet friendly phone. But he planned to give them no choice in the matter. If they wanted answers about the New Hope Island mystery, and he planned to ensure they would, people would have to buy and read the paper. Maybe it was a foolhardy approach. His instinct told him it wasn’t.
The website could cover the run-up. He wanted maximum exposure and as much cross-media hype as could be generated for that. But once the expedition members touched down on New Hope, anyone wanting to follow their progress would be obliged to buy a copy of the Chronicle to do so.
He should call Karl Cooper. He had mentioned the Shanks apparition to Cooper and Cooper had been non-committal about it. He should tell him about the conclusion he had reached on its lack of real relevance. Karl was his expert on alien abduction, an astro-physicist by training, a cosmologist who argued that benevolent alien civilizations had been watching us and watching over us, for millennia.
He shared McIntyre’s own conviction about what had occurred on New Hope. He said that the relative integrity of the site meant that the evidence would still be there for them to find. He was genuinely confident of that.
He would call Cooper and then he would call Lassiter and get him moving on Ballantyne. He looked at the models on his desk. He picked them up, raising one in either hand, examining their clever engineering, their bright and seductive intricacies, in the light of his halogen desk lamp. His ex-wife, in who he regretted having confided his theories, had dismissed them as toys. They would see about that. The clock was ticking down, wasn’t it? He could not remember having felt so excited since his childhood.
Alice Lang was elegant in a grey flannel suit, her lower half encased in its pencil skirt, her long legs tucked sideways beneath the armchair in which she sat. She was smoking. She was perfectly entitled to do so, Lassiter thought. It was her house they were in.
‘I’m concerned about you.’
He shrugged.
‘You don’t have the self-esteem you did in the job. I could see it in your posture the moment I opened the door to you.’
‘Well, I didn’t have a warrant card to flash.’ He smiled. ‘They give you a bit of authority.’
‘Yes, as does the rank of Detective Inspector.’
He shrugged again. He did not reply.
‘You’re struggling in civilian life, aren’t you, Patrick?’
‘We should discuss the film,’ Lassiter said.
‘I suspect you’re drinking too much.’
‘Guilty as charged,’ he said. ‘But I’m not on the couch, Alice. I’m not your patient, or subject or whatever. I want to know what you thought of the film.’
‘Well, I’m smoking.’
‘You are, unarguably.’
‘I gave up smoking seven months ago. It’s genuine, isn’t it?’
‘You tell me.’
‘It doesn’t work like that, Patrick. The first time I helped you, the O’Grady case?’
‘Yes?’
‘I went to the boy’s house, like one of those ghouls who treats a murder scene as a shrine to which they feel obliged to pay a pilgrimage. I went to the house and put my hand on the brass door knocker. And that was when I knew.’
Lassiter thought for a moment. ‘The camera has long gone,’ he said. ‘The original film is vacuum sealed to preserve it wrapped in special packaging in a strongbox in a vault somewhere. Probably Coutts Bank, if I know McIntyre, or one of those secure facilities in Knightsbridge or Mayfair beloved of secretive billionaires. I can get you the container the original film was stored in.’
‘You know that David Shanks touched it?’
Lassiter nodded. ‘He labelled it. He had it in his possession from the time he shot the footage until his death. It housed the film for all that time.’
‘What kind of man was Shanks?’
‘Elusive. I don’t think he ever really recovered from his experiences in the Great War. He was in the infantry at Ypres. He kept it together well enough to become a decorated soldier. But that wasn’t an achievement he built on in his life. He seems to have spent most of his time running away. There’s some suggestion of involvement with the occult.’
‘I’ve heard of New Hope Island. I suppose everyone has. The apparition seemed to be dressed in period clothes.’
‘He could have been an innocent witness to a paranormal event. He could have conjured or summoned the apparition in some way. If it is faked, it was very cleverly faked. The original film has not been tampered with.’
‘Why would he fake it?’
‘To raise money showing and talking about it, but the theory doesn’t stand up. He spent too much time and effort building the cottage on the island. And he was a loner, not a showman. He was on New Hope in the first place because he liked isolation. That was a consistent factor throughout his whole life.’
She pulled heavily on her cigarette and exhaled. It was obvious to him that Dr Lang had really enjoyed smoking, before her successful attempt to quit. Under the glamour and serenity, he suspected that she was quite highly strung, as anyone with her unwanted gift would be.
‘I can’t promise anything. But if you give the film container to me, if I can handle it, something helpful might occur to me.’
Lassiter rose to go. He had already taken the DVD from her player and put it in his pocket in its case. It felt intrusive and awkward there, too big for the space it occupied, almost as though the two-dimensional image it bore had a three-dimensional life. ‘When,’ he said, ‘shall I come?’
‘I need to go into town this afternoon. You live in town, don’t you?’
‘My flat is in Waterloo.’
‘Don’t come to me, Patrick. I’ll come to you.’
Two things occurred to him when she said that. The first was that he could not remember the last time he had received a domestic visitor. Apart from utilities people, no one ever came to the flat. It was an indictment, really. It was an admission of his social and personal inadequacy.
His second conclusion was no more comfortable and was a copper’s intuition. She would come to him because she did not want the film can in her house. She would help him for old time’s sake. But she had considered the apparition on the screen an abomination, hadn’t she?
She paused on the doorste
p, showing him out. She blinked in the bright sunlight of the afternoon and opened her mouth as though to say something and then closed it again, the well-shaped lips pressed firmly together, having changed her mind concerning the wisdom of saying anything at all.
‘What?’ He said.He smiled. ‘The truth will out, Alice.’
‘You need to take better care of yourself, Patrick. You were a very good detective. You were also quite a decent human being. You still are. Try to remember that.It would do no harm to remind yourself of the fact from time to time.’
He walked back to his car shaken by her insights and flattered by her concern in equal measure. Was the booze habit really so obvious? He knew he had been a good detective. Sometimes he would take out his commendations and read the citations and recall the cases in which he had earned them. It was one of his delaying tactics in the evenings when the thirst came upon him and he craved a drink before the appointed hour.
He had not mentioned to her how accident prone his home had become since he had first viewed the film. If there was an unwelcome presence in the flat, he thought that she would be aware of that straight away. She would pick up on its hostility. Why had he bothered to suggest the film might after all be faked, when both of them had emphatically known it wasn’t? He could kid himself that he was just following procedure, allowing the most plausible possibility until it was disproven. But it had actually been simpler than that. It had been wishful thinking.
His mobile rang. McIntyre’s name appeared on the display. He stopped in the street and answered it.
Several books had been written about the New Hope enigma. The principle theories about the disappearance were mass suicide and some kind of disease epidemic. In a weird reverse take on Ballantyne’s earlier career, one theory held that the whole population of the island had been abducted and sold into slavery.
There was no real evidence to support any of these explanations. The forensic evidence, or rather the total lack of it, suggested most the mad notion that the community had been whisked off into space by aliens.
Lucy Church favoured the suicide theory. The idea of women walking into the sea with their children held in their arms was a morbid one. And no bodies had been recovered, washed up on the coast of the Scottish mainland. But the other hypotheses made even less sense. Atlantic currents could have taken bodies out to sea where they would have been food for the ocean’s scavengers.
Her first New Hope piece had appeared in that morning’s edition, which broke the news about the expedition in a front page lead story. She had personalised what she had written in the way discussed the previous afternoon with Carrick. She had concentrated on the children. Their school had been a simple hut made from driftwood and tarred canvas. After the disappearance, the books had still lain open on the tea chests the pupils had used as desks. They had been reading Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, but had never got to finish the story.
Their oilskins had still hung on their schoolroom pegs when they vanished. Lucy speculated in her piece on whether they had lived to reach adulthood. It seemed extremely doubtful. But there was the remote possibility that Ballantyne had moved his people on to another location without sharing his plans with the people they traded with or anyone else.
Their destination would have needed to be impossibly remote and he would have required a large vessel, or a convoy of smaller ones, in order to transport the entire community. But Lucy felt that she had to speculate on survival in her piece. Poignancy was good, but the idea of a classroom of seven and eight year olds all just perishing at once, was far too bleak.
Carrick had dropped by her desk an hour before to say that early reaction to her feature had been very positive. The breaking story of the expedition had raised single copy sales in their rough early estimate by 25 per cent. Most of the national radio and television news programmes were doing pieces on the New Hope mystery and this ambitious effort finally to solve it. They were getting massive airtime in Scotland, of course.
Everyone on rival titles wanted a few live quotes from Alexander McIntyre. But he was not going to do any favours for competing media and wasn’t going to pre-empt what they would write in tomorrow’s edition as the countdown gathered pace. He had given one written quote and that was going to be that. He was quoted as saying that of course he was going personally and that he was going with an open mind and looking forward very much to getting there.
Lucy’s task for the day was to write up a profile of one of the expedition’s team of experts. It was the virologist Dr Jane Chambers. She was one of the most brilliant specialists in her field. She was also stylish, good-looking and a shrewd self-publicist, Lucy thought, who had maximised her assets to achieve a high-profile and probably quite lucrative sideline in science based television. There wasn’t time for a face to face. She rang her on her hospital department extension at 2.15, the agreed time, and made do with a brief phone interview.
‘Do you have a thesis about the disappearances?’
‘I have a theory.’
‘Would you care to share it, Doctor?’
She heard her subject draw in an audible breath. ‘Pen poised?’
‘I’m taping this.’
‘Okay. We are talking about a time when cholera and typhus virtually wiped out entire villages in England and in continental Europe too, for that matter. Disease was more often fatal than not. They simply didn’t have the medical knowledge or resources to cope with it. Bad diet and poor hygiene undermined their immune systems. In modern times, think of the 1980s, before the retro-viral drugs, when an HIV diagnosis was a death sentence. In the early 19th century a whole range of infections were just as deadly.’
‘Would there not have been graves?’
‘I think there is one, a mass grave. It just hasn’t been located yet. Whatever hit them spread with the speed of the Black Death and they buried their dead in the same way as they did during that epidemic. It was very virulent. We’ll find a plague pit, Ms Church. I will stake my reputation on it.’
‘How do you think the outbreak began?’
‘My guess would be that there was a carrier. My money would be on that being Seamus Ballantyne himself. He’d travelled to Africa and the West Indies, hadn’t he, in his occupation as a sea captain. I think he brought something deadly back in his blood and passed the infection on.’
‘Why were there no bodies?’
‘I’ve told you, there are bodies. They just haven’t been found. There’s a plague pit on New Hope Island.’
‘But Ballantyne was a carrier in your hypotheses. He didn’t get infected. And others must have helped him bury the victims.’
‘A handful, in the end,’ Dr Chambers said.
‘What happened to them?’
‘Ballantyne wouldn’t have known he was the carrier. He was a hellfire preacher, not an epidemiologist. The survivors quit the island in haste and in a small boat and the boat foundered and their bodies were torn to pieces over time on the reef that surrounds all but the eastern approach to New Hope. They were food for the fishes, Ms Church.’
Lucy had to admit this was the most convincing explanation of events she had come across so far. She said so.
‘Thank you. I enjoyed your piece about the school. It was moving without being maudlin and very atmospheric. I could see their little stools with the embroidered cushions still on them. You can certainly write.’
‘Thank you.’
Lucy put down the phone with a higher opinion of Jane Chambers than she had possessed a few minutes earlier. And it was not just because of the compliment she had been paid. All of McIntyre’s team were of a high calibre, when she thought about it. It made her think the New Hope mystery might actually be in danger of being definitively solved.
She was about to start to write up her interview when her phone rang. When she picked it up, the switchboard asked her could Dr Chambers be put through. She said yes, of course.
‘There is one more thing you might wish to include in your piece,�
�� she said. ‘If I am right about this and it was an epidemic, the virus or bacillus is likely to be live. It’ll be present in the corpses, in their bone marrow or their teeth or the roots of their hair. It’ll be highly infectious and we might not have an antidote to it.’
‘Would that not deter you from going?’
‘I’m not a dilettante, Ms Church. Some people are prey to that misapprehension about me because I drive a sports car and wear good clothes and appear on their television screens from time to time. Fripperies aside, I’m first and foremost a scientist. The New Hope mystery has fascinated me since childhood. Nothing would deter me from going.’
On the morning of his first full day on New Hope, Napier decided that going for a run would be the best way to familiarise himself with the Island’s topography. He was in the habit of keeping fit. It would also get him away from the company of the Sea Sick Four and their conversation, most of which seemed to comprise accounts of the various confrontations they had enjoyed manning the doors of the nation’s nightclubs in their past lives.
Blake’s banter was of a slightly different order. He had endured some of that over breakfast.
‘Wouldn’t have had you down as a poof,’ Blake said.
‘Come again?’
‘Your partiality to folk music is a dead giveaway. The Barnsley Nightingale, isn’t that what you called her? Do you crochet as well?’
‘Of course I do. Doesn’t everyone? And my wallet is full of supermarket loyalty cards. And nothing gives me the satisfaction that bleeding radiators does.’
‘And you window shop at Homebase.’
‘No, I don’t,’ Napier said. ‘It’s too exciting for me, Homebase. Wouldn’t want to raise the blood pressure and put myself at risk of a stroke.’