by F. G. Cottam
‘Seriously, though,’ Blake said, ‘folk music. It’s a bit left-field for a bloke like you.’
‘You should rest Whitney and give it a listen.’
‘I’ve read your file. As the leader of this outfit I was obliged to read your file. You’ve been involved in some pretty tasty bits and pieces, over the years.’
‘All behind me, Captain. What do you have planned for us for today?’
Blake shot a contemptuous look at the Sea Sick Four, huddled over their breakfast skillets on the ground thirty feet away. ‘Orientation,’ he said.
‘I thought I’d go for a run.’
‘Fine, you can orientate yourself doing that. But, a word of advice?’
‘Go on.’
‘When you hear voices singing rural ballads, just keep going and remember it’s all in the mind.’ Blake tapped his temple with a forefinger and grinned.
Up until that moment, Napier hadn’t minded any of what had been said. He had quite enjoyed the give and take of it. At that moment though, he felt very much like throwing a short left hook and breaking the captain’s jaw.
Instead he went over and had a conversation with the others, trying to keep it light and friendly, aware of his past reputation as someone who could be a bit aloof, appreciative of the fact that they were drawing the same pay and wearing the same uniform and of the same nominal rank.
He had a mug of tea with them. He learned that none of them had been to Scotland before. He listened to their complaints about not arriving aboard a chopper and pretended to agree and thought that after the incident in Helmand, if he never saw the interior of a chopper again as long as he lived, it would be far too soon.
After that he changed and went for his run. The day was bright and blowy. A Kate Rusby song insinuated its gentle rhythm into his mind. He never ran wearing an Ipod. He liked to be alert to ambient sound and old habits died hard. He hummed along with the melody in his head. It was the song Sweet Bride from Kate’s masterpiece, Sleepless. Captain Bollocks didn’t know what he was missing. And he never would, because he was the sort of stubborn bloke of whom life’s bigots are most naturally made.
His heart rate rose and he started to work hard, the undulating ground forcing him to think about his pace and technique over it as the endorphins began to flow and his mood lifted as it always did when he ran. Running was the easy bit, he had long concluded. All the difficulties started only when you had to stop.
He thought about the event of the previous evening only when he neared the point at which it had occurred. He would pause for a breather and examine the spot. There was no confidential murmur of sad lyrics now, only the wheal of the wind over razor grass and scrub. And there was the sound of the sea of course, there was always that.
He jogged lightly over the lip of the ridge and looked down into the scooped depression below. And his eye caught something pale on the green ground. It was a clay pipe, small and white and when he picked it up, the bowl of it still warm.
Alice Lang occupied some of her morning reading a speculative newspaper piece about the New Hope Island mystery written by a journalist called Lucy Church. If the picture by-line was an accurate indication, Church was a good-looking woman enjoying a high profile position on the paper. Alice thought that the subject matter held such intrinsic interest it might more accurately be termed fascination.
The disappearance was one of the great enigmas of recent British history, after all. But there was no denying the writer’s gift for orchestrating facts and presenting plausible theories. And she couched what she wrote in phrases that were both original and vividly evocative of time and place.
Alice was grateful for the diversion the piece provided her with. She did not wish to dwell on the experience of late the previous afternoon at Lassiter’s flat. She knew that eventually he would ring her and that she would be forced to relive the moment. But she would not choose to relive it; she would endure that only when doing so became a moral obligation, forced to warn the detective when finally he called.
Warn him of what, though?That he was out of his depth? That he was up against forces that were malign and dangerous? Could she convince him that the threat was way beyond a policeman’s powers of deductive reasoning? She wasn’t really optimistic that she could. She didn’t think he would be easily scared or easily deterred either.
She knew what he was doing. It was more than just the courtesy of waiting for a civilised hour at which to make the call. He was busy. He had other business to attend to. He was at Alexander McIntyre’s beck and call and McIntyre wanted more information on the Hope Island settlement’s founder than seemed to be readily available in the public domain.
A bright eleven year old with a casual interest in history or mystery could probably recite most of the salient facts about Seamus Ballantyne. This was because they were well known. But when you thought about it, they were actually remarkably few. Most accounts tended to concentrate on his epiphany, the moment on the cobbles of Liverpool harbour at which he suddenly became aware of how monstrous a commercial enterprise the slave trade actually was. Even that, though, was the subject of some dispute.
One account had it that his conversion came as he waited in the offices of the mercantile maritime board to collect his ill-gotten wages. Another claimed the moment occurred on a Sunday morning as he lay at home in bed and heard a church bell toll. A third recounted how the revelation came to him as he dipped his fingers into a christening font to make the sign of the cross in holy water as he left the funeral service of an old shipmate fallen victim to cholera.
In a way, that particular detail did not really matter. The fact of his conversion was the thing. But other, more significant facts were scarce. There was almost nothing on record about the belief-system his remote community clung to in their storm afflicted isolation once on Hope; nothing about the powers of oratory or personal presence Ballantyne must have possessed merely to recruit and convert and get them there.
It was known that his adoption of religious faith and leadership had cost him his marriage. It was believed that he had sunk his considerable personal fortune into the New Hope project. It was assumed he had been ruthless and industrious in his trading of slaves, captured in Africa and bartered in the West Indies and America for the sugar and rum and the cotton he brought back from those places to be spun in the mills of Lancashire.
But almost everything about Ballantyne was supposition and McIntyre quite naturally wanted verifiable facts about the man. And he thought his tame detective the ideal person to provide him with them.
Lassiter had told Alice as much the previous day, making her welcome during her visit to his spartan home; pouring her tea and putting biscuits onto a side plate on his tiny dining table as he explained about McIntyre’s earlier phone call and the visit to Liverpool it would necessitate. He had sounded more intrigued than put out about the Liverpool trip. It was not quite police work, but it was investigation and he was both comfortable in working to his strengths and intrigued to gather fresh information about his somewhat elusive subject.
‘When will you leave?’
‘In a couple of days, I should think.’
She nodded, thinking that there would be no one left behind to miss him. No pining children, no faithful wife to offer a tender kiss of farewell and a heartfelt wish that he should travel safely.
‘I’ll go and get that film can,’ he said, then.
She smiled. Butterflies fluttered suddenly in her stomach. She became aware in the shudder of an aircraft overhead that Lassiter’s neat and dowdy bachelor home lay directly under a flight-path. The bulk of the aircraft cast the room into gloom as it briefly crossed the sun in the sky outside and then brightness returned to it. Lassiter re-entered the room, carrying something matt and metallic and circular and closed the door softly behind him. He put the object onto the table top and a sour aroma rose as Alice sensed the milk curdle in its jug among the tea things and the fillings in her rear teeth start to throb and she was
obliged to blink and swallow back vomit welling sourly from deep in the back of her throat.
‘I can’t do this,’ she said.
‘You look pale,’ Lassiter said, sitting down in the chair opposite hers, on the other side of the table. ‘Here.’
He handed her a linen napkin. She dabbed at her forehead aware that the napkin, pale and blamelessly white, smelled of mothballs. The smell was probably only a suggestion, but it was strong enough to sear her nostrils and water her eyes with tears that made her wince. It was always like this. It had never been this strong before, though. And she had not even touched the film can yet. She had not even properly looked at it lying next to the biscuits on the tablecloth.
‘I can’t do it,’ she said again.
‘Then don’t,’ Lassiter said. His tone was at once firm and kind, no suggestion at all of resentment in it at her having wasted his time with this neurotic show of theatricality.
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ she said out loud, to herself, her hand reaching for the film container before his could to put it back, her fingers closing around the curved matt metal as darkness imploded blindly in her and her mind groped through an abyss more dismal than she could have imagined possible.
She had been right about one thing, she thought now, remembering. She had been right not to let him bring the film can to her home. She did not honestly know how he could bear to have that object remain there in his. Then again, he did not possess what was widely regarded as her gift but she now knew without question to be more in the nature of a curse. He could live with the film can under his roof and it would give him no great cause for concern.
Or would it? Alice shivered, though the day was bright outside and the room she occupied already warm. Had Lassiter been entirely straightforward with her? Was there more to his own experiences since locating the film than he had shared with her? It was possible. His alcoholism had surely encouraged years of secrecy and addicts were good, weren’t they, at hiding things.
She looked at the landline, mounted on the wall. She looked at the mobile sitting, slightly sweaty in the palm of the hand not occupied with her cigarette. She was aware that she was pacing the floor, as she had pretty much since the start of the day and her sustenance free breakfast of black coffee. She did not need sustenance. She had not really needed caffeine, even after a mostly sleepless night. Chemical stimulation had not been necessary at all. She was raw with alertness. Fear could do that. Dread could, too.
She had only sat, when she thought about it, to read the piece in the paper written by Lucy Church. The rest of the time she had spent standing and pacing and waiting and trying not to recollect.
It had been night time. The man had unlatched the door of his cottage and exited and she had seen that he still possessed the spare build of someone young. His cheeks were gaunt though, in moonlit shadow, and the hair on his head white and unkempt in the wind she thought probably always a feature of the place. He had worn no coat, as though the decision to leave or the summoning had been a sudden one.
He walked to the cliff edge. Hundreds of feet beneath where he stood, at the base of that granite rampart, she could hear the ocean in waves that boiled and foundered on the rock. Sea spray rose and gathered in droplets in his hair and beard as he braced himself against the withering gale. The sky was cloudless. Stars gaped in the blackness before him and grass in tussocks rippled around his naked feet. She could smell the Atlantic salt and shuddered with vertigo at the edge of an abyss of space.
And she realised the man was not there alone. There was a presence, studying him, a dozen feet from where he stood. It was entirely still and she could make out no individual features. It was just a shape, a denser darkness than the night, more solid than the air, still and watching. And then it spoke. It recited words from a language unfamiliar to her ears. Its voice was deep and deliberate, a shudder of sound, not human at all. And the man at the cliff edge glanced across at where it came from and grinned back and winked conspiratorially and he stepped from the cliff edge into the void and slipped from sight with what seemed like a last, abject sigh of relief.
Alice wished that Lassiter would call and she could get it over with. She knew some effective techniques for erasing bad memories from the conscious mind and they had always worked for her, however recent the memory concerned. As soon as she had spoken to Lassiter she would employ the most effective of those techniques and banish forever from her mind the event touching the film can had encouraged her to see.
Lucy Church went to see Karl Cooper at his home in St John’s Wood. The editor, Marsden, had ordered the profile written, very probably as the consequence of a command direct from McIntyre. The proprietor would probably have expected James Carrick to do the interviewing and writing personally. He was features editor, after all. It was rumoured that McIntyre and Cooper were friends and so it was not in the interest of the editor to be seen to be delegating important assignments down the chain of command.
Perhaps James was just being characteristically lazy in passing on the job to her. Or it could be a question of practicality. He did not do much actual writing and would be rusty; hardly ideal with so high-profile and sharp-minded an interview subject. On the other hand, her being given the assignment could be construed as further evidence that she was excelling at her work and gaining further stature on the paper as the New Hope expedition and it’s attendant hype gathered impetus.
She was glad to be doing the job. Cooper had long intrigued her. Of all the New Hope experts, the cosmologist had the highest public profile because of his television series ratings and the best-selling status of the books he had written. Of all of them, he was the one with the most legitimate claim to being a household name.
Other scholars had speculated about the possibility of alien tinkering with human history; of course. Structural enigmas from the pyramids in Egypt to the Roman catacombs had made it a tempting and profitable area of discussion for better than half a century.No one with Cooper’s academic credentials had done it though and no one, until him, had done it with quite the compelling force of argument he had consistently demonstrated.
It did not hurt that he was so handsome a man. Even approaching 50, he remained as telegenic as he had been in his thirties. He still regularly topped magazine style polls. He was an impressive physical specimen with an air of authority, a natural charisma and a twinkle of sly humour in his pale blue gaze. They were the assets of an academic turned natural media success. His charms seemed not so much assumed as completely instinctive. Pushing at the bell outside his front door, she wondered would he possess all or any of them in the flesh.
She had a moment to envy him the trappings of his success in the location and grandeur of the house he occupied. She knew that the dome of an observatory capped the building outside of which she stood. She hoped that her interview would be conducted there. Though she couldn’t see it from where she stood, so substantial and imposing were the lower reaches of his home.
He opened the door himself. He flashed his celebrated smile. He did not treat her to a ritual of luvvie air kissing, though. Instead, he rather formally offered his hand and introduced himself before ushering her into his domain of speculation about the unsolved mysteries of the physical world.
Lucy made a mental note concerning the specifics of the handshake. It had been insistent but not bone-crushing; the palm encountering hers smooth and dry but firm rather than soft. Such details were important to some of their female readers in a Mills and Boonish sort of way and she was only really comfortable recounting them if she could do so honestly.
There was a waft of aftershave. It smelled lemony and expensive. He was dressed in faded jeans and a chambray shirt and gray stubble glittered slightly on his unshaven jaw. She saw with relief that he was as tall as he was supposed to be; or assumed to be from the rangy way he strode around the ruins of places he claimed had been built with the assistance of technologies from far flung galaxies.
‘Ms Church, or Lucy?’<
br />
‘The latter.’
‘Then please do call me Karl. Come in, Lucy. I’m delighted to make your acquaintance.’
He was light on his feet, lithe on the tread of the stairs. She assumed they were headed for the observatory. It was daylight and the dome would be redundant in the most important sense, but it was the spot from where he studied the heavens in what she further assumed was the wait for the moment when the alien visitors overcame their reserve and made formal contact with the inhabitants of earth. It was the intimate space where his eye was given licence to roam through the glass of the dome to infinity. She smiled to herself. She’d have to remember to write that sentence down.
She’d caught the merest hint of a regional accent in the few words he’d spoken. It was not really discernable on television. But she knew from her research for this interview that he was originally from the town of Wigan in the north of England. His father had been a tool fitter. It had been a modest trade of sorts; the sort of occupation made obsolete during Britain’s Thatcherite years. Unemployment and hardship had come to the Cooper family in the early 1980s, when his mother had taken cleaning jobs to enable Karl to go to university.
It was what you had to look for. The past informed the present. People were where they’d come from and how they’d grown up. She would get beyond the doctorate in cosmology, the PHD in astrophysics, the clutch of broadcast industry awards. She would get beneath the urbane extra-terrestrial television pundit. She would overcome the clichés and arrive at the man. It was her job and she was good at what she did.
They had arrived at the observatory. The dome was vast and the light so brilliantly generous it was as though the heavens poured it in. Cooper walked over to a glittering chrome refrigerator as tall as he was and pulled open the door. Chilled drinks were frosted at their necks with cold within.
‘Regular or diet,’ he said.
‘Diet,’ she said. She was still panting slightly with the steepness of the climb. She’d have to hit the gym a bit harder before New Hope Island. God forbid, she might have to lay off the smokes, too. ‘I understand you’re a friend of my boss?’