by F. G. Cottam
‘Great,’ McIntyre said. ‘Terrific.’ The deal was done. The exorcist was in. His mind had already moved on, was now on those Ballantyne miracles, which a little extra-terrestrial technology would have enabled, he thought, with consummate ease.
‘You ought to know, if you don’t already, that I have what is these days termed a history, with one of your experts.’
‘Oh? Which one is it?’
‘Karl Cooper,’ Degrelle said, ‘the cosmologist who believes humanity has had a helping hand from elsewhere in the universe.’
‘And what’s your take on that?’
‘God made man in his own image, Mr McIntyre. Or so it is written in the Book of Genesis. And the Cardinal told me you were raised a Catholic, so you should be familiar with the first commandment.’
‘The one about worshipping false idols,’ McIntyre said, with a smile.
‘Indeed. Who do you have in mind to write the background piece about me in tomorrow’s paper?’
‘Lucy Church is already on it, in the hope that you would agree to participate. Are you familiar with her writing?’
‘I am a fan,’ Degrelle said.
Philip Fortescue had suspected for quite a long time that the fate would link him in some important way to the long dead slave vessel master whose sea chest lay in the basement of the museum where he worked.
His own experience with the chest had been an unpleasant one. It had taken place during his one inventory of its contents, five years earlier. And it had come as a dismaying shock to him. He’d been completely unsuspecting of anything out of the ordinary. His predecessor as Keeper of Artefacts had died suddenly and left his successor no warning concerning the old iron-braced box and its hoard of maritime keepsakes.
Fortescue had only learned of the chest’s accident-prone reputation after his own encounter with it. What had happened that afternoon five years ago had made him curious to discover more about both Seamus Ballantyne and his malicious hoard.
It was only after his ordeal in the museum basement that he learned about David Shanks and the theft. He learned too about Elizabeth Burrows. When he saw her picture, a formal shot taken in cap and gown at her degree congregation, he recognised her straight away. By then, the suicide with the pale face and dark eyes had become familiar to Philip as the apparition sometimes haunting him.
His mistake with the chest was provoked by disrespect. He should have trusted the growing feeling of dread he felt as he lifted out the items it contained and examined them. It was not a normal feeling. It was the sort of fear he thought later that enabled our primeval ancestors to survive when stalked by some large and cunning beast. They had escaped only because they obeyed the instinct and bolted.
He didn’t. He told himself not to be so stupid. He was six months into his new job and finding it an excellent fit. He wouldn’t run away from a routine task in the museum basement on the strength of a feeling for which he could find no rational cause. No matter how strong the presentiment; and it was almost overwhelming in its clammy grip on him, he resolved that he would ignore it and complete the task in hand.
He came across the bracelet of teeth that Lassiter would be disturbed to identify as human carrying out the same rite five years on. He held it up to what limited light the feeble overheads down there allowed, stretched taut between his extended thumb and forefinger. The teeth glittered and the bracelet, shaped thus, seemed to grin gleefully at him.
He slipped it over his wrist. It felt loathsome across his fingers and he was forced to swallow in terror as his heart thumped and fluttered with an accelerating beat. So he slipped it over his wrist, defying his screaming nerves, to do what he would have done had he felt in the mood for a bit of jocular mischief; instead of filled, as he actually was, with abject terror.
The teeth closed around the skin. They moved and chattered and then bit him hard and he screamed and wrenched the circle of dead bone and enamel off and did what he should have done much earlier and slammed shut the chest lid and fled.
There had been two bracelets, originally. Elizabeth Burrows came to him one night, months later, and confided that. He woke and she was there, silhouetted by the pale curtain over his tall bedroom window, standing poised in the still darkness an hour before dawn. There had been two bracelets, she said. And she had stolen one of them during her scholarly examination of the contents of the chest in the autumn of 1971.
She couldn’t explain why she had taken it, she said. She could have understood her own motive had she taken something that had belonged to Rebecca Browning. She had admired Rebecca Browning greatly. Had Ballantyne’s chest contained something of hers, a locket or a ring perhaps, she could have understood herself coveting and stealing such an intimate keepsake in a moment of impulsive weakness.
The bracelet she had taken had never belonged to Rebecca. Elizabeth was sure of that. It had been in Ballantyne’s possession, must of course have been to have been in the chest at all. But she did not honestly think it could have been his, either. She could not imagine him adorning himself with such a gruesome and barbaric embellishment. He’d been a mercantile seaman from Liverpool, not a Barbary pirate.
The bracelet she stole performed an interesting trick, she told Fortescue, as he lay petrified in his bed and listened to her whispered account.It sat still and innocent on the surface of the desk in her college room until night fell. And then it dragged and chattered across the polished wood and shaped itself as a mouth in slivers of pale movement and it spoke to her.
‘It lisped,’ she said. ‘It lisped out secrets nobody should hear. And hearing them was unbearable and I couldn’t make it stop and so in the end I sought the comfort of death to end the nightly torment of what I was being told.’
The ghost of Elizabeth Burrows never spoke to him again after making this strange confession. He was grateful for that. But he would see her sometimes on the edge of his vision, in a pub or a coffee bar, pretending to read a book and watching him, quizzically.
Her features were as striking in death as they’d been in life, but the sight of her wasn’t a comfortable one. Looking at her was disconcerting and he thought that staring back at her might even be a dangerous thing to do.
After his experience with the chest, when he felt fear, whether it was rational or not, he respected it for the warning he knew it to be. He never looked directly back at her during his fleeting encounters with Elizabeth’s ghost. He didn’t want to risk provoking her. So he couldn’t read her expression. And he didn’t dare try to discover why she continued to take this morbid interest in him.
He felt more than just sympathy for Edith Chambers. She’d undergone the ordeal of her dialogue with the ghost of Jacob Parr without complaint. He thought her stoical, much braver than he was. It was the reason he’d agreed to help her.
She needed help and he had the expertise to be able to provide it. He had the museum’s research facilities at his disposal. He had the catalogues of most of the maritime archives in the country on his computer hard-drive. He had member-accounts and access codes and census and parish records available to him pretty much at the press of a button. Not many people could be better placed than he was to trace Thomas Horan’s lost or hidden journal.
It was fate, wasn’t it? He could interpret what had happened in no other way. He was an unremarkable man remarkably well equipped to help a little girl unravel a mystery that urgently needed solving.
Would Horan’s clandestine account explain what had happened on New Hope Island? Fortescue did not see personally how it possibly could. The chronology was completely wrong. The journal entries had been made during the Andromeda’s voyages, a good decade before the establishment of the New Hope community and over a quarter century before its disappearance.
He shook his head and smiled to himself, his reflection showing faintly in the grey screen of the monitor he was about to switch on to begin his search. It was the classic mistake; second guessing the nature of your source material before you had even located
it.
Barnsley, he thought. It was a medium sized Yorkshire town. There could not be more than four or five likely locations he should explore. And what if – when – he found the journal?
He was certain of one thing. He would read it before he travelled to Surrey and handed it over to Edith. That would be his reward for its discovery. It might make enlightening reading. His fascination for maritime history had put him where he was. Horan’s account might be atmospheric and informative and even revelatory. Reading it was a treat to which he would certainly be entitled.
He wondered was Edith fortunate enough to have inherited her mother’s looks. He’d had a crush on Jane Chambers for what seemed like most of his adult life. It hadn’t been that long, of course. He was 30 now and had only become aware of her when she presented the series she’d written for television on the subject of the Black Death.
It hadn’t been just him. Most of the male TV critics had been swooning in front of their flat-screens. He remembered reading the reviews. They were printed under titles like, ‘Fever!’ and, ‘Chambers of Delight.’ They were sexist, but understandably so, given how intoxicating was her combination of analytical brain and cool blonde beauty. He wished it was Jane he was giving the journal to if he discovered its whereabouts, and not her daughter. He would have given a lot for a legitimate reason to meet the lovely Ms Chambers and have a conversation and perhaps a drink with her.
He smiled again, ruefully this time. He would have to settle for watching the series again. He’d bought it on Blu-Ray as soon as it had come out. He’d probably watched it through, half a dozen times in total. He knew each episode by heart. He’d become an accident expert on the series subject matter. He could probably choose the Black Death as his specialist subject on Mastermind and win the bloody thing.
He switched on the computer and stretched his fingers above the keyboard as the Apple logo clarified at the centre of his monitor. Daydreaming about a drink with the lovely Dr Chambers would not help him find the lost document her daughter so urgently sought. He needed to crack on.
They found the boat at dawn. Davis called it in, on patrol in tandem with a former rifleman called Walker. Napier got the alert over the short-wave only a few minutes after waking and putting on his habitual morning brew of strong coffee. It was 5am, full daylight and the scheduled arrival of the expedition proper was less than 48 hours away.
The coffee would have to wait. The boat was a rigid inflatable and would not. As Napier got his gear together to go and take a look, it occurred to him that the recent wars had done this. The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan had made these ex-servicemen very alert and careful and observant. Perhaps, though, it had been ever thus. His father had served in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s and Geoff Napier had been nobody’s mug.
On the way to the spot where the boat had been discovered, Napier pondered, as he had the previous night, on the news about the exorcist, Degrelle. They were being clever, McIntyre’s organisation, in the lead-up to the arrival of the experts. Once they arrived on the island, the only source of news about events there would be daily editions of the paper itself. Prior to that, they were using the website to promote the whole shebang to the fullest possible extent.
Napier and his team had web access thanks to the departed comms expert Brennan. He had rigged four laptops and as head of security, Napier had been given the password to get them up and running. The internet connection was sporadic and fairly slow by high speed, fibre-optic cable standards. That level of signal strength just wasn’t possible where they were. And the passwords would be changed once the experts commandeered the command post hardware. But for the present, the security boys were well and truly in the loop.
Brennan’s logic had been that the computers would function better given a running-in period and frequent initial use. McIntyre had personally okayed the security team’s access because he thought email the most practical way of compensating for the persistent problem they had with radio contact. Napier thought it good for morale, because he suspected Davis was not the only member of his outfit spooked by the island in ways that did not lend themselves to rational explanation.
They felt far less remote permitted to use the laptops, able not just to keep abreast with developments in London, but to liaise regularly with the people employing them. It also signified a level of trust that simply hadn’t existed in Blake’s time. They had not then had the stature or the authority. They did now. Napier took that as a compliment.
He didn’t quite know what to make personally of the addition of an exorcist to their distinguished group of imminent guests. The front page story on the website the previous day had been dramatic but vague. He was being parachuted in, was the phrase used, but the reason given was not specific. Developments were referred to, but they were not explained in any detail. Napier was personally aware of some very disconcerting developments. But he had shared the knowledge – beyond the obvious fact of Blake’s disappearance – with nobody.
He had heard of Degrelle. He had seen him clash on Question Time with Karl Cooper, the cosmologist who believed in little green men from far-flung galaxies. Degrelle did not. The priest was a Vatican heavyweight, a legend among the old service veterans of African campaigns. Davis had informed him of this fact the previous evening after their shared reading of the story on the Chronicle website.
The French had invoked the name of Degrelle in the Congo fifteen years earlier, when Davis had been involved in that incidence of tribal magic there. The village killing had been a ritual atrocity, a child sacrifice made during an outbreak of devil-worship. The French had threatened the village elders with Degrelle, an old adversary of the devil the villagers seemed to fear and respect in equal measure. Approaching the spot on the shoreline where the boat had been found, Napier suspected that the old exorcist might have signed up for an eventful summer trip.
The first thing about the beached craft was that it was military specification. Napier had not only seen the model before but had been aboard one on a few occasions. It was the vessel used by the Royal Marine Commandoes and the SBS. It was powered by an outboard, but the engine had been angled inward, with the propeller raised out of the water. This suggested that its approach to the island had been achieved by hand, by paddles, which was ominous.
Davis and Walker had hauled the craft up onto the sand, beyond the gentle waves of a supine morning sea. Conditions were perfect for the boat coming ashore. Or they were at this spot, because there was no surf. Napier went and put his hand on the engine cowling. It was cold. So was the cylinder casing, stone cold. This inclined him to believe that the boat had not in fact been paddled, but had drifted ashore. So did the fact that the boat was there at all.
‘Davis?’
‘No attempt to deflate or scuttle it, which is what you would expect of a covert crew just attempting a covert occupation of the island. If on the other hand it had ferried passengers here, it would have been long gone by the time we found it.’
‘It’s an eight man boat,’ Napier said.
‘I’ve seen them take twelve at a push,’ Walker said.
Weight had beached the boat. Empty of cargo, she would have drifted offshore again. She was anchored by the poundage of the equipment stored aboard. There were two tents, stoves, a radio transmitter, three pairs of binoculars, distress flares, a compass and boxes of sealed foil packs of field rations. There were drums of fuel and two video cameras of the same type Napier had seen photo-journalists use shooting combat and background footage in Afghanistan. There was no mistaking that their specification was of professional broadcast standard.
‘Not bird watchers,’ Walker said, reading Napier’s thoughts. ‘Not hobbyists.’
Davis said, ‘I don’t thing they made it.’
‘If they had foundered, their gear would be in disarray,’ Napier said. ‘It doesn’t look like a wave hit them. This stuff is bone dry and still squared away. But you’re right. It doesn’t look like they made landfall. The
y wouldn’t abandon their shelter and sustenance and they wouldn’t leave the evidence of their arrival in plain sight for us to find. The cameras alone must be worth twelve or fifteen grand apiece.’
‘It’s odd,’ Walker said.
‘Everything about this island is fucking odd,’ Davis said. He looked at Napier, ‘With respect, Sir.’
Napier just nodded. He could hardly disagree. His predecessor had been in denial about the island’s mysteries and it had cost him his life. Or Napier assumed it had. He certainly never expected to see Captain Bollocks in this world again.
‘Puncture it,’ he said, gesturing at the boat. ‘Put sand in the outboard’s fuel tank. Then we’ll drag it up to the bog land behind us and conceal it under scrub. I think you’re right, Davis. I don’t think they made it, whoever they were.’
‘They weren’t military. There’d be markings and the ration packs would be standard issue and they’re not,’ Walker said.
‘Rivals of McIntyre’s media outfit. Poor bastards,’ Davis said.
‘We’ll bury the boat and the food and the jerry cans and remember where we’ve done it in case we have cause to dig it up in the future and salvage rations and fuel,’ Napier said. ‘Doesn’t do any harm to have a supply dump on the island. The other gear we’ll hump back. McIntyre’s people might want it as evidence of something in the future. Get on the shortwave, Davis. Rouse everyone. We’re going to do a thorough search.’
‘There’s no one here, Sir,’ Walker said. He shivered, despite the mild breeze of the temperate morning. ‘Only us, I mean. They didn’t make it.’
‘We’ll search anyway,’ Napier said. ‘It’s our job. It’s what we do. You know that.’
Davis said, ‘And if bodies have drifted ashore?’
‘We call this in whether we find corpses or we don’t,’ Napier said. ‘McIntyre’s people need to know about this right away. I’ll have to try to get through on the radio. This is a bit too sensitive for email.’
‘Good luck locating a signal,’ Walker said.