by F. G. Cottam
‘You’re a very good writer.’
‘And I haven’t lost the hope of one day writing something very good. In the meantime, I do this. How’s that daughter of yours?’
‘The dreams have stopped.’
‘Is that good, or bad?’
‘It’s good. Edith sounds relieved. I don’t think she was telling me the whole truth about Jacob Parr. I don’t think he was quite as wholesome as she made him out to be to me.’
‘She didn’t want to worry you.’
‘Anyway he’s gone. And it doesn’t sound as though he’s coming back.’
‘Are you all packed and ready for the trip?’
‘I very nearly pulled out. I think you’re aware of that. The Hebrides seems an awfully long way from Surrey, when your daughter’s sleep is disturbed in such a sinister way. And it was sinister.’
‘There’s no other word,’ Lucy said. ‘But it’s stopped. And you’re going. Think you’ll rub up alright against Karl Cooper?’
Jane was silent for so long that Lucy thought the connection severed. Then her voice came on the line. She coughed to clear her throat and said, ‘I’ll have as little to do with him as I possibly can.’
‘I asked him about you.’
Again, the silence. Then Jane said, ‘You didn’t include anything about me in the piece you wrote about him. I didn’t read it, but a colleague would have mentioned it if you had. What did he say about the affair?’
‘He came out with some self-serving crap about how the press had distorted the facts to make him look like the villain of the piece and you the victim of a broken heart. He said it was a distortion of the truth.’
‘He hit me.’
Lucy was stunned. She thought she must have misheard. ‘He did what?’
‘He hit me twice. I mean he hit me on two occasions. I should have left after the first time he did it. I didn’t. I am very ashamed of that, of just how badly I let myself down.’
‘Christ.’
‘This is between us.’
‘Of course it is.’
‘I’ll see you at Heathrow. Keep the seat next to yours vacant for me, if you board before I do. I’m a nervous flier.’
‘I’m not great myself.’
‘Then we can be terrified together. Sheer good luck, by the way.’
‘What?’
‘In avoiding diseases, Lucy. I’ve just been lucky.’
Lassiter strongly suspected that his encounter with the ghost of Elizabeth Burrows was an experience familiar personally to Professor Fortescue. He knew that the museum’s Keeper of Artefacts had once inventoried the contents of Ballantyne’s sea chest because Fortescue had admitted doing so. Further, he had said it was not an ordeal he would be willing to repeat. And he had warned Lassiter that the period immediately following his visit to the museum’s basement would be time most sensibly spent in company.
The ex-detective in him wanted to know what it was that had driven the woman whose spectre he had seen to self-murder. He had not felt suicidal after examining the contents of the chest. Fortescue was still alive. Shanks had been a suicide though, if what Alice saw in her mind after touching the film can was to be believed.
Lassiter did believe it. He had every faith in the powers Alice possessed. He was not falling in love with her; he had already done that. But she had demonstrated her psychic talent to him before his feelings for her had really had time to develop. He believed in her not out of infatuation, but because when he’d still been drawing a Met Police salary, he’d seen the proof of what she could accomplish.
Shanks had stolen something from the chest. Doing so had triggered a run of ill-fortune that had dogged him and persuaded him eventually to return the stolen object. His luck didn’t change though and eventually, he despaired to the point where he threw himself off a cliff.
Elizabeth had hanged herself in her college room in one of the halls of residence at Liverpool University. She hadn’t left a note. She had left behind an unfinished thesis on the proto-feminism of Rebecca Browning, the woman who had married and then abandoned Seamus Ballantyne after his conversion to his self-elected ministry.
The chest was the connection between Shanks and Elizabeth and the obvious conclusion was that Elizabeth had stolen something, just as Shanks had, and had paid the price for doing so with her life.
The disparity was that Shanks had waited years to do it. Elizabeth had been driven to take her life in a period of less than two months. And she had been a woman with far more than the itinerant Shanks to live for. She’d been young and quite strikingly beautiful. She’d possessed brains and a passionate ideological commitment. She’d not had the time to grow disillusioned with life and for a lifetime’s drinking to undermine her physical health, as he had.
Looked at another way, she’d been much more vulnerable than he had been. Shanks had been a naturally courageous man, further steeled by his experiences as an infantry officer on the Western Front in the Great War. He’d been totally self-sufficient; a man able to survive as a crofter on a remote and otherwise uninhabited island. Perhaps most significantly, he had dabbled willingly in magic.
He’d been an acolyte of the black arts. It was what had got him excluded from the bohemian Cornish commune to which he’d belonged back in the 1950s. If there had been something of George Orwell about David Shanks, there had been something of Aleister Crowley, too.
If he had stolen something malevolent from the chest, its magic might not have surprised him too greatly. If Elizabeth had stolen something with similar powers, it would have shocked and dismayed her and undermined her belief system. She would have doubted her sanity. Logic would suggest to her that it wasn’t the object at all. Reason would insist she was losing her mind.
A brilliant and fiercely independent woman, threatened with what she thought was the onset of madness, might be driven to kill herself. She might see no viable alternative to the degradation of being sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Lassiter just couldn’t picture the poised woman he had seen in that dockside pub, buckled into leather restraints in a lunatic asylum’s padded cell.
This was all speculation on Lassiter’s part. In looking for a causal link, he had created one. But he didn’t think the supposition all that far fetched. He’d seen what he’d seen in Liverpool. He’d felt what he had felt. And before he left for the Hebrides, he wanted as many answers as his training and talent for detection could provide him with. For the first time, he began to suspect that the object Shanks had taken from the chest, had been something other than the slave captain’s pocket watch.
Again, this was only a hunch. But it was a suspicion growing in strength. If Shanks had stolen an object that valuable, he would have done so for financial gain. He would have found a way to sell it. He’d been resourceful, he’d had a cool nerve and he’d been without scruple. You didn’t need to go through an auction house to profit from an object as rare as that. There were private collectors, all over Europe and throughout America. Shanks had been a relentless traveller. He would have found a discrete buyer somewhere for Ballantyne’s Breguet.
Elizabeth Burrows had lived in a hall of residence in Bootle. She’d killed herself in the autumn of 1971. There would have been a post-mortem. Drugs had been ubiquitous at that time among students, even more so then that they were now. They had possessed a cache then; they were a rebellious lifestyle statement, taking them a pre-requisite if you were a part of the counter-culture and hostile to the status quo and the Establishment.
The college authorities and presumably her parents would have wanted to know whether she took her life under the influence of LSD or cannabis or amphetamines. Her body would have been tested for drugs and her room would have been searched and the contents duly listed. Even 40 years ago, the Merseyside force would have been diligent and professional in dealing with the violent death of a young woman.
Lassiter paced the carpet of Alice Lang’s sitting room. They had been more or less living under her roof since that l
unchtime kiss she had requested and got. Personally, he had never felt happier. It was like living in the exhilaration of a waking dream. He hadn’t felt like a drink since she had taken him to her bed for the first time on that dappled afternoon of sunlight and pasta salad and Ellie Goulding in her garden.
Professionally, though, he had misgivings about the New Hope Island expedition so deep that they almost felt like dread. And they departed in three days.
Not quite on a whim, he walked into her study and switched on Alice’s computer and tapped in the password she had shared with him. The Sygma photographer whose job it had been to take pictures of the items in the chest way back in 1957 had been a northern stringer from Manchester by the name of Albert Struthers.
Struthers had stayed with the photo agency after that commission. He had not deliberately walked into the path of a Deansgate tram, or been found one cold and lonely morning hanging from the iron girders supporting the end of Southport Pier – the subject of an excellent black and white photo essay he’d done for the town council earlier in that monochromatic decade. He had not just been a still-life man, but a highly competent all-rounder able to get interesting results from pointing his lens at virtually any subject.
He had stayed with the agency, but he had shifted hemispheres. The first Struthers commission completed after the Ballantyne chest contents was a piece done for Picture Post on the Sydney Harbour Yacht Race. In 1960, he covered an Australian election campaign and in 1961 he was responsible for a charming set of portraits of the more illustrious inmates of the Zoo at Perth.
Struthers died of heart failure in his sleep at his home in a Melbourne suburb one night in August of 1976. That was a full 19 years after the museum commission. There was no evidence to suggest he had married and he had left no children in whom he might have confided uneasy secrets. ‘You didn’t deliberately end your life,’ Lassiter said to himself, ‘but I’ll bet you took fright and ran away from something. You ran all the way to the other side of the world.’ He closed the pages he’d been looking at and switched off Alice’s computer and returned to the sitting room and resumed his pacing across the floor.
Who did he know on the Merseyside Force? He didn’t know anyone. But he did have a Scouse ex-colleague based at Fulham who would. Jimmy Daley was a D.I. who had transferred from Liverpool to the Met after meeting and marrying a girl from Kingston-upon-Thames. He had been a Detective-Sergeant back then and he and Lassiter had become mates. They were both on the up back in the late ‘90s, rivals in crime solving and drinking buddies before Lassiter’s drinking had really got out of hand.
Lassiter still had Jimmy Daley’s mobile number. He rang it. Daley answered. They chewed over old times for about ten minutes and then Lassiter told Daley what it was he was after. Daley said it might take a day or so to source the information required.
‘It’s funny you should call, Patsy. I was only thinking of you this morning,’ Daley said.
‘Spooky.’
‘Not really. I read about you in this morning’s paper. You’re going on that New Hope Island thing with Alice Lang.’
‘Guilty as charged.’
‘She’s very easy on the eye, if the picture in the Chronicle’s anything to go on.’
‘Yes, Jim. She’s certainly a beautiful woman.’
‘A bit too complicated for my tastes. I don’t mind the trick cycling part. But the second-sight thing would completely freak me out.’
‘I can see your point,’ Lassiter said, which he could.
‘I’ll call you back on the Bootle business. Expect it can wait till tomorrow?’
‘It’s waited since November of 1971,’ Lassiter said. ‘It can wait another day, Jim.’
In the event, Detective Inspector Daley called him back later the same afternoon. Lassiter was running in Regent’s Park, when his mobile rang. He had tucked it down his sock. McIntyre did not pay him to be out of reach at any time. Taking his phone when he went running was a necessary precaution, working for such a capricious and demanding boss.
‘She had a bit of cannabis resin, what they used to call Lebanese, back in prehistoric times,’ Daley said. ‘Enough to get busted for in those days, but there was nothing in her system. No drugs, no alcohol.’
‘Anything else?’
‘A bottle of absinthe. That was illegal too back then. The seal wasn’t broken. She’d brought it back from somewhere as a souvenir, by the look. France or Corsica would be my best guess.’
‘France. She had a thing for this French revolutionary martyr, Charlotte Corday.’
‘There you go, then. France.’
‘And that’s it, Jim?’
‘Not quite. She had a bracelet, an ethnic item. It didn’t look like she wore it. Maybe Indian or possibly African in origin, it’s described as a fine antique silver chain strung with about 30 human teeth.’
The sun shone above him from a blue afternoon sky. He’d been sweating with exertion. Now, he felt suddenly cold and a shiver ran through his panting frame. ‘Cheers, Jim,’ he said. His voice had become hoarse.
‘You alright, mate?’
‘Yeah,’ Lassiter said, not feeling alright at all, not feeling remotely all right, in fact. ‘I owe you one.’
Alexander McIntyre went personally to see Father Degrelle at the seminary in Highgate where the veteran exorcist resided in a modest cell. Raised a Catholic, the media magnate had allowed his faith to lapse over the years of his success and enterprise. But conscience, or possibly nostalgia for his more innocent youth, had influenced his charitable activities. He had given sufficiently generously to Catholic causes to have the ear of the Cardinal.
‘Vanity,’ the Cardinal told him over the phone, ‘is Degrelle’s great weakness. He goes on your expedition with my blessing. But he can be a contrary man. At three days notice, he will know he had been at best, an afterthought. I hope you can persuade him, Alex. I would suggest flattery is the key to doing so.’
‘Shall I woo him personally, Your Eminence?’
‘Always wise, I think, with a man like Degrelle. He has a very high opinion of himself. But then his strength and will make him enormously formidable at the ritual. And there is his faith, of course, which is unflinching and unwavering. He is the best at what he does. The problem is that he knows it. He will watch for your arrival through his window. I suggest the Bentley. You still own the Bentley, Alex?’
‘I do.’
‘Excellent. And have your chauffeur wear his full livery. And have him salute you when you exit the car. Father Degrelle appreciates status. And he loves ceremony.’
They walked together through the seminary’s ornamental gardens so that Degrelle could smoke. This was something McIntyre observed he did ceaselessly. Physically, he was imposing, both tall and heavily built. He had the wary tread and club fists of an ageing pugilist. He’s God’s prize-fighter, McIntyre thought, smiling to himself. He’d go the championship distance with Satan himself. He’s perfect material for the expedition and in the hands of the gifted Lucy Church would make riveting copy on reputation and appearance alone.
Was he quotable, though? And there was the more immediate question of whether he would even agree to go.
He listened in silence as McIntyre offered a brief history of events on New Hope and then outlined the aims of the expedition. Then McIntyre, tired of his own voice, said, ‘Do you think demonic possession could have destroyed the New Hope community?’
‘Destroyed it, no.’ Degrelle said; ‘afflicted it, without reasonable doubt. The heretic Ballantyne was almost certainly a servant of Satan.’
McIntyre had never heard the reformed slave master called a heretic before. Degrelle’s use of the term reminded him that the Vatican had its own historians, its own intelligence network and its own take on theology.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘There is compelling anecdotal evidence that Ballantyne was able to work what his followers construed as miracles. He got the power to play his tricks from somewhe
re. It was not from the Almighty.’
When Degrelle spoke, it was like listening to words chiselled from stone. He was a gift from God, McIntyre thought, if he could be persuaded to go.
‘Your Cardinal has sanctioned your participation in the expedition.’
‘I have no interest in debating the theoretical fate of the New Hope blasphemers with your motley collection of so-called experts.’
‘But your Cardinal would like you to go.’
‘What he actually said, Mr McIntyre was that the choice was mine. The notice is short. I suspect the task will be arduous. The island is damned. But the tormented souls there deserve a chance of salvation, however misguided and sinful they were in life.’
‘You’re saying you’ll go?’
‘I have my duty as an ordained priest. My mission is to save, Mr McIntyre. My vocation is to serve. Therefore, I will travel on your expedition.’
‘We would like to break the story of your participation on the front page of tomorrow’s edition of the Chronicle,’ McIntyre said, reaching into his pocket for his mobile.
‘How many column inches are you thinking of?’
‘The whole of the front page,’ McIntyre said. ‘Interest is at fever pitch. Your eleventh hour recruitment is a dramatic development. We’re literally talking breaking news.’
‘Excellent. You can send a photographer round to do a portrait shot in situ this afternoon. I take it you will have a background story on an inside page?’
‘Of course we will.’
‘I have some pictures, career highlights, if you will, inside. They should illustrate the story very nicely. I will email high resolution scans to your picture desk as soon as we conclude our conversation.’
‘I cannot tell you how pleased I am you’ve agreed to do this,’ McIntyre said.
‘It’s my calling,’ Degrelle said. ‘I know the history of the island. The entreaty comes late, but it must be answered. The will of God must prevail if we are to be spared. One cannot escape one’s duties in life. The circumstances really give me no choice but to go.’