by F. G. Cottam
The day had started badly. She had opened the newspaper in Costa over her habitual flat white and seen the splash on Karl Cooper with the picture by-line above it of the smiling Lucy Church. Smiling and increasingly prolific, she thought, folding the paper and consigning it to a rubbish bin without further study of the piece. She knew all she ever wanted to know about Karl Cooper. Her confrontation with Edith was going to make the day painful enough without exposing herself again to past emotional bruises.
She had failed in her relationships with men. That was the brutal truth of the matter. She hadn’t brought enough to the party. Neither was she a very good mother, she didn’t think. On the day their divorce had been finalised, Edith’s father had sent her a text message saying that she lacked the gift for intimacy most people who commit to marriage seem naturally to possess. She thought when she considered this, that it was a harsh judgement but probably also true.
Edith was 14 now. Jane had given birth to her too young. She had only been 18, practically a child herself. She had married. She had continued with her education. Her parents-in-law had seen more of her daughter than she had in those early years of Edith’s infancy. Her father, Michael, had been reduced to the role of a house husband during the first, hectic, burgeoning years of Jane’s professional success. And then six years ago he had packed his bags and left. And then when she reached eleven, as soon as it did not seem actually to construe an act of child cruelty, Jane had despatched Edith off to school.
A failed wife and a neglectful mother reminded of her own gullibility in love prior to setting out to break her daughter’s heart over a summer of callous abandonment. It was fair to say that Jane was not having one of her best mornings. She was wondering what else could possibly go wrong when she was pulled over by a police patrol car for doing 40 in a 30 mile an hour zone.
She could have wept. But the officer driving the car recognised her from the telly and asked her for an autograph and gave her only a telling off pitched between sternness and flirtation. She tried to tell herself this reprieve was the start of better things, but then drove the remainder of the journey cautiously and with a heavy heart at how she thought Edith was likely to react to the news of her plans for the summer.
Her first appointment at the school was not with Edith but with the pastoral carer, Mrs Sullivan, who wanted to raise a matter she had claimed was too delicate and confidential for discussion over the phone.
Jane didn’t think it worth speculating on the nature of whatever it was her daughter had done to earn Mrs Sullivan’s attentions. She considered the school’s pastoral arm an unnecessary concession to political correctness. The woman herself was a bit of a jobs-worth with a manner that had always seemed to Jane both pompous and condescending. The refusal to disclose details over the phone was entirely characteristic. Edith was a good girl, moral and rather serious and not given to delinquency. At least, that was how she had been a few weeks ago at Easter, when her mother had last had her at home.
The school was neo-Gothic, set in grounds that sumptuously reflected the fees paid by the parents of the pupils there. Raked gravel crunched under Jane’s tyres along the neat drive stretching from the pillared and gated main entrance. She was shown into Mrs Sullivan’s office after only a short wait. She was aware of heavy furniture, a tall arched window, the smell of freshly cut flowers and carpet pile deep under the soles of her sensible shoes. She was invited to sit on a leather Chesterfield under a portrait of the school’s proto-feminist founder. Mrs Sullivan, tall and slender, was more glamorous but even more grave, if possible, than she remembered.
In a brief preamble, Jane declined tea, coffee and water and allowed that the current spell of good weather was indeed very agreeable. There followed a moment of silence. Footsteps carried on the parquet in the corridor outside, their progress along it sounding suitably urgent. The school encouraged an air of purposeful industry.
‘I want to talk to you about your daughter’s musical gift.’
‘Edith doesn’t possess a gift for music, Mrs Sullivan. She is 14. If she did, it would’ve manifested itself before now.’
‘Perhaps she’s a late developer.’
‘On the contrary, she’s always been a rather precocious child. But she’s never shown an interest in music.’
‘Until now, that is.’
Jane frowned. She had an ominous feeling. It had raised goose bumps on the flesh of her arms, under her tailored suit, despite the warmth of the sun bathing the room through its tall west-facing window. She said, “I think that you had better explain.’
Mrs Sullivan looked no more comfortable about this than Jane suddenly felt. She was pale and when she tried to smile her mouth merely twitched. She said, ‘It began, Edith says, with a dream. Are you familiar with a folk song called The Recruited Collier?’
‘No.’
‘You do not listen to folk music?’
Jane shrugged. ‘Not really, maybe a bit of Laura Marling.’
‘The song was written in the eighteenth century. It was included in a collection of Cumbrian ballads compiled and then published in 1808. In recent years it has been recorded in versions by Anna Briggs in the 1960s and latterly by Kate Rusby. The Rusby version is the first track on an album of the singer’s favourite songs, entitled 10 and released in 2002.’
‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Jane said. ‘Why are you telling me this stuff?’
‘You’ve never heard the song?’
‘I’ve vaguely heard of Kate Rusby. I’ve never owned or played any of her music. I’ve never heard of Anna Briggs and I can assure you, I’ve never in my life heard The Recruited Collier.’
‘Edith first performed the tune a little under a week ago. We encourage the children to improvise their own entertainment. It keeps them away from computer screens and games consoles.’
Jane knew this. It was one of the reasons she had chosen to send her daughter there. The goose bumps were still prickling at the lining of her suit coat sleeves. The ominous feeling in her stomach was churning now, like dread. She said, ‘How do you mean, she performed it?’
‘She played it on a penny whistle. She played it not only note perfectly, but with the panache of a virtuoso. Our music teacher, Mr Clayton witnessed the moment. He was moved to ask where Edith had learned the tune. She said that a man had taught it to her in a dream.’
‘Go on.’
‘Mr Clayton recognised the song. He asked Edith did she know the words. She led him to the music room and sat at the piano and she sang and played it for him there. Her pitch was perfect and the playing accomplished. It was the dialect she sang in that unnerved him.’
‘Even more than the way she claimed to have learned the song?’
‘He said if you closed your eyes, you were listening to an accent unheard in England for at least a hundred years.’
‘So he’s a linguist, on top of being a music teacher.’
‘I’m only repeating what he said.’
‘My daughter cannot play the piano.’
‘I’ll accept that she could not. She can now.’
‘I don’t know what to say,’ Jane said. ‘Except that I’d like to see Edith, right away.’
‘Of course,’ Mrs Sullivan said. She looked directly at Jane, making Jane realise that it was the first time she had really done so since the moment she had entered the room. Then she said, ‘I’d consider it an act of kindness if we could speak again when you have talked to her.’
There was something about working for Alexander McIntyre that sometimes left Patrick Lassiter feeling slightly grubby. He did not feel his professional integrity compromised by the first class return rail ticket from London to Liverpool. He felt that his expertise earned him the comfort of his seat and whatever refreshment he chose to select from the snack trolley. Just as he felt he deserved his room at Liverpool’s five-star Adelphi Hotel for the duration of his stay. It made sense for him to arrive un-rumpled and free of fatigue and be comfortably berthed once there. Tha
t was just McIntyre trying to ensure he got the best from the man he was employing.
What did it, what left him feeling less than wholly honest, was what McIntyre termed the oiling of the wheels. In his past life, Lassiter’s warrant card had given him access to the places to which it was sometimes difficult to gain entry. Now, McIntyre’s money and his influence were doing that.
The Ballantyne artefacts he was curious to see were housed at the Liverpool Maritime Museum. They were not on public display though and they never had been. Lassiter’s first attempts to get to see and examine them had been coldly rebuffed. It was not in the interest of the museum to foster publicity for the New Hope Island expedition, it was explained. To co-operate with a project so blatantly sensationalist would undermine the academic credentials of the museum and the authority and morale of its staff would subsequently be bound to suffer.
Lassiter persisted. But the answer remained the same. He rather admired the austere and snobbish stance taken against his enquiries. It was inconvenient, but he could see and appreciate the museum’s rationale.
Then something changed. McIntyre casually mentioned that he would have one of the people who ran his charitable foundation call the person responsible for raising and sustaining the museum’s public funding. This was an institution vulnerable, in the current economic climate. It had lost its central and local government support. It had seen its lottery grant substantially reduced.
Lassiter never learned the specifics. A donation, when all was said and done, was a completely different thing in law from a bribe. All he knew was that the attitude of the people responsible for the museum’s archive suddenly changed. They became cooperative where they had been obstructive and cordial where there had previously been only disdain. McIntyre, being McIntyre, had facilitated this. And Lassiter felt in some subtle way that he had been tainted, guilty by association, a party to a procedure that was less than wholly honourable.
Did it matter? Not really, he thought, in the scheme of things. He was no longer employed to be the honest copper, clear of any hint of corruption or collusion. He worked for McIntyre now and he did as he was bid. But he still entered the museum building at the appointed hour on the morning after the night of his arrival in Liverpool feeling a shabbier man than he could remember having been in his sometimes prestigious past.
The museum itself was opulently appointed; a Gothic-revival extravagance of scrolls and etchings and reliefs in its ornamental stonework. Compasses and coils of rope and capstans and ships wheels were prominent themes in the carved granite and marble. To the right of the main entrance a colossal old anchor sat heavily barnacled on a section of chain with iron links the thickness of a man’s forearm. Lassiter had always thought the sea an alarmingly alien and violent element and the iconography of this building dedicated to the subject did nothing whatsoever to change his mind.
The museum was sited on a stretch of still-cobbled street behind where the wharves of the West Dock had once been. It was a quiet location. You would not happen upon the building without knowing it was there. He fancied he could smell the sludge of the Mersey on a light summer breeze and gulls wheeled crying a few feet above his head. He noticed that there was no traffic noise.
He was ten minutes early for his 11.15 appointment. During those ten minutes, as he stood in a high vestibule lined with oiled wood and waited for the time to tick by on a handsome Victorian clock, excited mounted in him at what he might yet discover there.
He kept an open mind about the mystery of New Hope Island. He believed that the Shanks footage was authentic and could not explain it in rational terms. And he had told McIntyre the truth in saying that watching it had scared him pretty badly.
He did not really know what to make of the death of David Shanks – his suicide – in that cliff edge ritual described by Alice Lang. He did not know whether to believe it had taken place or not. But he knew for certain that she believed it and her psychic gift was something he had seen emphatically proven, twice during his police career.
He did not know what to make of his own accident prone existence when harbouring the Shanks film can in his flat. He just knew that it had stopped, as abruptly as it had started, since he had quarantined the container in a safe deposit box at a storage facility, rented with McIntyre’s money in Wimbledon, a dozen distant miles from where he lived in Waterloo.
He was aware of McIntyre’s theory that Shanks, having dabbled in demonology, had brought the manifestation he had filmed to New Hope Island with him. Either that or it had pursued him there. McIntyre believed it had nothing to do with the mysterious fate of the island community. But Lassiter thought that was most likely to be because the existence of the apparition rested uncomfortably with McIntyre’s own, privately held theory as to the community’s actual fate.
He went over in his mind what he knew about the cache of belongings held by the museum in a sea chest that had once been owned by Seamus Ballantyne. The chest and its contents had been donated by his estranged wife. Her name had been Rebecca and her maiden name Browning prior to her marriage to the slave ship master.
He had been prosperous, successful and respected when they had met. They had done so at a hunt ball held at Fleetwood, on Lord Hesketh’s estate. Rebecca’s father had been a local magistrate and she had been a beauty, by all accounts, naturally blonde and finely boned if considered slightly tall and a bit too slender by the voluptuous standards of the time. Hunting had been her passion and she had caused a minor scandal by refusing to ride side-saddle in pursuit of the fox.
She had been strong willed, much more independent than was common among even women of her privileged class in her day in provincial England. She had set fashions. In later life, she had campaigned for the education of girls. Her radicalism had not extended, though, to the emancipation of slaves.
Lassiter thought that she must have been a cruel woman. But that was what the historians called revisionism, wasn’t it? He could not judge her by the standards of a more compassionate and enlightened age that hers. In the late 18th century in England, slavery had not just been a legitimate trade. It had been entirely socially acceptable. House boys from Africa, dressed in picturesque costumes, had been a domestic fashion in Georgian English homes.
Rebecca Browning wouldn’t have seen the conditions aboard her husband’s ship. She wouldn’t have seen the corpses freed of their manacles to be thrown over the side in the morning when the first mate inventoried the body count in the stinking hold from the night before.
She had been thirty when her husband’s epiphany arrived and totally resolute in rejecting his new faith and his makeshift ministry on the cobbles of Liverpool harbour. She could hardly really be blamed for that. Marriage was a contract in those days and the New Hope adventure was not something really covered by the vows she took at the altar. Perhaps she had been a religious woman. If she had been, his conversion would simply have been heresy to her.
From her perspective, Seamus must have become a stranger overnight, in the grip of a religious zeal that must have seemed obsessive. Maybe she simply thought he had lost his mind. That happened a lot in those days to men who spent their lives at sea. They went mad on solitude and over-proof rum and the sheer incessant hardship of life before the mast. His conversion could easily have been interpreted by his wife as nothing other than the onset of lunacy.
This reverie was something Lassiter rather enjoyed. He had a taste for psychology and his interest in history had grown since his work concerning New Hope Island on behalf of Alexander McIntyre. The characters were intriguing. David Shanks had been a private, flawed, shiftless puzzle of a man. But Seamus Ballantye, more remote in time, was a genuine enigma.
His speculations were interrupted by the arrival of the individual he was there to meet. Professor Fortescue was the museum’s Keeper of Artefacts. It sounded an ominous and even slightly sinister sort of job. Everything the man handled had belonged to someone long perished. And Fortescue, slender and bespectacled, looked
a good decade too young to be the occupant of such a portentous role.
He also looked distinctly nervous. He had before him what Lassiter assumed was a sort of manifest. It was a document curled and yellowed with age and written freehand by someone with perfect copperplate. It was torn in tiny fissures at its edges and obviously stiff. He might have been nervous about this document incurring damage in the ambient humidity and overhead light. But observing his discomfort, Lassiter thought there was likely rather more to it than that.
Fortescue cleared his throat. ‘Are you familiar, Mr Lassiter, with how common superstition is in regard to the subject of the sea? I mean with the prevalence and sheer persistence of some of those superstitions?’
His voice was characterised by the nasal twang of Liverpool. He was educated, probably the bright and studious product of somewhere like Merchant Taylor’s, the elite grammar school in Formby. No doubt the Keeper of Artefacts had a good degree from somewhere to his name. And his phraseology was pompous. But he was local, from a local family, which was to Lassiter’s advantage in helping provide context.
‘I am, Professor Fortescue, though obviously I’m not the authority you are on the subject. Can I ask why it is that you bring it up?’
Fortescue wore glasses. They had gold frames. The frames glittered in the sunshine coming through the high windows of the vestibule. He put down the manifest on a large marble topped table bearing a single flower vase over in the corner. He played with and then removed his glasses. Then he polished their lenses on his tie and put them on again. It was an old-fashioned gesture for so young a man and one dictated, Lassiter thought, totally by nerves. The lenses of his glasses had not been smeared.
He raised his head and gave his visitor a frank look. He said, ‘I know that you used to be a police detective. No one gains access to our private collection without screening.’