Ascension

by Oliver Harris

  When Kane finally saw a flat roof on struts with two pumps beneath it, he felt disproportionate relief. The words Birdie’s Refuelling Station had been painted onto the canopy. Aside from the pumps there were two rusted portacabins and a fire hydrant. No one around. He walked over. The pumps themselves were locked. Kane wondered if being sent here was a joke. Where was the golf course? He turned back to the bomb craters and realized he was looking at it.

  Flags had been stuck into the volcanic rock. He walked up to a flag and saw where a hole had been drilled. Someone had smoothed areas of crushed, compacted lava, binding it with what smelled like diesel oil. Sand had been arranged around the edges to demarcate the greens: fragile white outlines, like the ones around the graves at Comfortless Cove. Suddenly a cloud of black dust rose from behind a ridge. Kane heard swearing, and a moment later two men appeared carrying golf clubs, both upwards of fifty. The larger of the two wore a Panama hat. He had a pink face behind a neat white beard, and thick, hairless legs sticking out from his tailored white shorts. The smaller was almost child-size, in a fisherman’s hat too large for him and sunglasses with thick black lenses. They saw Kane and regarded him cautiously at first.

  “Have you seen a ball?” the smaller man asked.

  “I’m afraid not. I’m looking for Terry.”

  “That’s me.”

  “My name’s Edward. I was told you might be able to rent me a car.”

  The bearded man grinned and clapped his companion on the back.

  “A customer, Terry,” he boomed. “Don’t give him any old crap.”

  “I’ll give him what I’ve got,” Terry said.

  They walked over to the pumping station. The bearded man introduced himself as Derek. There was only one Derek on the island according to Kane’s lists, and that was Dr. Derek Nulty, the doctor who’d pronounced Rory dead. His voice was rich, mannered.

  “Come from a base?” he asked.

  “No. I’m an academic. Just doing some research.”

  “You’re one of the environmentalists,” Terry said.

  “More the history side. Human history.”

  Terry nodded, still searching for his ball, tapping his club against the pumice like a blind man with a cane.

  “Looks like a challenging course,” Kane said.

  “Worst golf course in the world,” the doctor said. “It’s famous. Do you play? There’s a tournament coming up.”

  “Haven’t played for a while. Willing to give it a go.”

  When they got to the station, Terry unlocked a gate and led Kane to a lot at the back. There was only one car in it, under a blue tarpaulin. Terry dragged the tarp off to reveal an ancient-looking white Ford Laser with rust along the joints.

  “Does it run?” Kane asked.

  “Let’s see.”

  Terry fetched keys and a towel from the office, then opened the doors and stood back as hot air escaped. The towel was wet, and when he wiped the steering wheel it sent up steam. He did the same to the seats, then got in and tried the engine.

  It ran. He asked for five pounds a day. Kane gave him cash up front for the vehicle and to fill the tank.

  “Don’t forget to register it with the police,” Terry said. “Where are you wanting to go with it?”

  “Not sure. Just exploring the island.”

  “You won’t be able to take this one off-road. And mind the crabs. The claws puncture.”

  “And mind the drunkards,” the doctor added. “There’s enough of them.”

  Kane drove slowly at first. The steering wheel felt loose. The Check Engine sign came on, then turned off again. On the plus side, driving was on the left, British-style, and he could now cover the island in a few hours.

  Occasionally another car would pass him, sometimes military, sometimes civilian. The drivers waved in a ritualistic way, eyes lingering on his unfamiliar face. He understood now: Not to wave would be odd, like being stuck in a confined space with someone and not acknowledging them. So he started to wave too. But as he headed to the north of the island, the other cars disappeared.

  He continued to the place Rory Bannatyne had been living and where his body had been found.

  11

  English Bay was located at the extreme northwest point of the island. It was home to the BBC’s relay transmitter complex and the island’s power station and desalination plant, and not much else. The road leading there was in good condition and didn’t have another vehicle on it.

  That suited Kane. He kept one eye out for police, the other for the British military and their subcontractors. But as he progressed, the idea of stumbling across other humans felt less and less likely.

  The island’s north was flatter, even more desolate, and when volcanic cones did arise they carried an eerie majesty. Vast cinder fields stretched between them and the road, plains with nothing but small jagged mounds of rock that looked as if someone had modeled a war-torn landscape in miniature. You could see where the crust of lava had cooled, then broken up as the flow beneath it continued. The process left strange shapes, like casts of once-familiar objects that had been shattered in rage. Black sticks of lava had curled like the handles of enormous teapots or twisted like the branches of trees. Kane stopped the car to feel them with his hands and they rang with the hollow chime of porcelain. He looked back down the road to see if he was being followed. Nothing moved but the heat.

  He drove alongside a ridge of striped cones his map named the Sisters, their bases lapped by undulating, silky silver ash dunes. Half a mile farther north he passed a sign for Broken Tooth Crater Firing Range, pointing down a narrow dirt track toward a volcanic cone with one side collapsed. Then more urgent notices appeared: DANGER—EXPOSED HIGH VOLTAGE, RADIO FREQUENCY LINES . So he was on the right track.

  Kane kept to the road and arrived at the BBC Atlantic Relay Station. It felt bizarre and strangely comforting seeing the old-fashioned BBC logo by the side of the road. The air filled with metal now, slender white poles that reached half a kilometer high with wires strung between them like an intricate net. The road divided, with one fork leading toward the power station and the other into the radio facilities. Kane continued through the BBC’s cluster of flat white buildings until he saw the sea and, just before it, Rory Bannatyne’s shack.

  Rory had chosen a curious place to call home. In 1920 some men had tried to establish a mining operation on Ascension. What they were mining wasn’t the rock but seabird guano, rich with phosphate. When the enterprise failed the works were abandoned, only to be repurposed in 1942 by US soldiers in need of accommodation. This was where Rory had moved: a rundown hut born of Edwardian industry and GI ingenuity. He had moved a week after arriving, claiming his original Georgetown billet was insecure. Here was security, discretion, and, as it turned out, a lot of beauty. Clear blue water, an empty beach protected from sight. Solitude. Privacy. Somewhere to hide.

  The shack itself was barely bigger than a caravan, with a few steps up to a wooden door. The bay over which it looked carried a deep sense of seclusion. There were no BBC staff physically based here anymore. Engineers visited occasionally to check the transmitters, but they were based at Two Boats. Most of the work was done remotely. An emergency phone stood beside the beach, alongside a life buoy. Kane checked the phone and it appeared to be in working order. Near the phone, the sand contained a cluster of white balls that he thought at first belonged to a beach game but, closer up, revealed themselves as broken turtle eggs, with the shriveled remains of the unborn turtles still inside. Three white oil storage tanks interrupted the view along the coast.

  He walked back up the beach to Rory’s home. At various points, holes had been dug, precise and deep, and after a moment Kane realized what they were.

  They’d dug around the hut as well. Down to the depth necessary to bury someone. Kane made his own brief search for burial spots, but the choice was hard rock or thin sand. It wasn’t terrain for burial.

  The door was unlocked. Inside, Kane was surprised to find
the hut still crowded with possessions. The police had opened all the drawers and storage, rolled up a rug, and pulled the furniture around. There wasn’t much else to search. The bathroom still contained Rory’s toothbrush and toothpaste; there was tinned food in the cupboard. Bedding had been removed, but not a half drunk bottle of red wine on the bedside table. Kane checked the obvious hiding places: behind the air vent, then the cistern. The bottoms of the drawers were real. He upturned chairs and checked the underpanels of the seats. He had a quick look for any bugs or surveillance devices, but it felt absurd. There wasn’t even a plug socket.

  Kane sat on the front steps, gazing out to sea, and imagined Rory doing the same. You would feel like a true castaway. One of the self-sufficient ones, perhaps. You had met all your human needs. Except one. And in the silence and the heat it becomes all-consuming.

  Rape the girl, kill her, kill yourself. It was plausible. According to Kane’s notes, Rory’s body had been discovered by a runway engineer, Gordon McNamara, in the morning of Sunday November 8, at approximately 0600 hours. McNamara was a keen scuba diver and had been hoping to fit in a dive before work, hence arriving at the remote English Bay at six am. He said he saw the body hanging from the antenna as soon as he got there—it was visible from the road down to the beach. The runway engineer had left his car to check what he was seeing, then rapidly returned and drove back to Georgetown to summon help. He made no attempt to cut down the body by himself: McNamara said he knew Rory had been dead for a while, as birds had begun pecking at him. Sergeant Morrogh and five other residents cut Rory down an hour later using a handsaw. The line Rory had used in place of rope was old electrical cable from the BBC store. They made no attempt at resuscitation. His body was taken to the hospital, where Dr. Derek Nulty pronounced him dead. By this stage the Administrator had been informed and had alerted authorities on Saint Helena and in the UK.

  Nulty estimated that the death occurred sometime between seven p.m. and midnight the previous night. That evening most of the island had been at a talent contest at Two Boats. The last people who’d seen Rory alive were two guards at the British base on Traveller’s Hill. He’d been seen driving west at around four p.m., toward the interior. They knew Rory, and the car he used—a boxy blue Fiat 500—because he was a regular frequenter of their bar. They couldn’t gauge if he was agitated or otherwise, but he was driving at a relatively sedate speed, no more than thirty miles per hour, they estimated. The car was parked neatly by his accommodation when Rory was found.

  The Ascension Island police found contact details for Rory Bannatyne’s UK employers, which put them through to the government department providing his cover. They, in turn, immediately contacted Kathryn Taylor, as protocol demanded.

  In a hurried call with Bower, Taylor had debated sending out a specialist police team under their own direction, but it would have been conspicuous and risked blowing Ventriloquist entirely. Their priority became getting his body back. It was a circuitous route. An RAF flight took the corpse to the Falklands, a second onward to Cape Verde, where it was transferred to a C-17 refueling on its way from Belize to Brize Norton.

  An initial autopsy in the UK recorded the cause of death as brain is­chemia due to asphyxiation, with reflex cardiac arrest, which fit death by hanging. A toxicology report registered 0.02 milligrams alcohol in his blood, which was equivalent to two or three drinks.

  Kane felt an urge to visit the antenna he’d used. He’d seen a photograph of it in the file, but there were none in the immediate vicinity. He had to go back up to the relay station. The antenna farm began on the other side of the road. Pylons rose up to one hundred twenty-five meters into the air: high frequency towers, antennae in circular formations, then some solitary ones—ones that looked like giant fish-scale TV antennae, one like a crucifix, with the top angled downward so it seemed to be bowing its head. Most would be involved in receiving or transmitting BBC signals. The idea had been to extend the reach of the BBC World Service, beaming to Africa until nightfall there before switching to broadcast into South America as it woke up. Not all the tech here was strictly BBC, though. This was a GCHQ outpost too, and it was unnerving being alone with the structures, knowing the power they signified, the secrets they were drawing down from the equatorial sky. There was a constant electric hum that sometimes resembled strange music, as if the wind was playing through the metallic rigging.

  The fragments of clinker here were sharp, with razorlike edges that scored lines in Kane’s shoes and the palms of his hands when he stumbled. What a final journey to make. How did you choose which antenna to hang yourself from? Seeing it every day, perhaps, sensing a significance that slowly revealed itself. When do you think “That’s the one”?

  There it was: one of the towers supporting the high-frequency arrays. Kane approached over the rough ground, touched the metal to gauge its temperature. Then he found the first of the footholds and began to climb.

  The strut from which Rory’s noose had been attached was high—six or seven meters off the ground. It would have been a long drop, a sharp break. Kane hauled himself up, then sat on the crosspiece and tried to think through the logistics. Balancing while tying it, your hands occupied. Is the noose already around your neck? Secure the cable, slip off. No one around. There’d been no other cars since Kane had arrived here. You could spend an hour getting ready. But equally you could spend an hour setting up what looked like a hanging, arranging Rory’s body, and then climbing back down and disappearing into the dreamscape.

  If that was what happened, it meant the killer was probably still on the island with Kane now. Which meant they’d be very alert when new people turned up, and willing to go to extreme lengths if they believed they were going to be discovered. Nowhere to flee—it was you or them.

  Birds tracked him overhead as he returned to the beach, white ones, fairy terns, curious companions. They hovered, dispersing only when he focused his attention on them. Early accounts of the island described how tame and fearless the birds had been, oblivious to humanity, sitting calmly among the sailors so that the men could just reach out and wring their necks.

  Violence infused the place. It seemed to press up from beneath the beauty, to make the whole place a lure, a trap, and the beauty something to poison yourself with. Rory’s hut sat alone, but not alone enough to escape. There was something it hadn’t disclosed yet, Kane felt sure. It looked like it wanted to speak, simultaneously slumlike and idyllic with a couple of plant pots, and a chimney, and three steps up to its painted door.

  Kane walked back to the steps and tried lifting the top one first. It was secure. But the middle step was loose and came away when Kane pulled, revealing a cavity below. Inside was the missing box file.

  He took it out and opened it. Whatever documents the file had originally contained had been disposed of. It held only loose Polaroids of children and a school exercise book. On the front cover of the book it said: Secret.

  Kane took it into the hut and opened it. The pages were crowded with children’s handwriting and drawings, in lead pencil and ballpoint pen and occasional colored pencil. The handwriting was barely legible. The drawings were more eloquent: faces, eyes stabbed or missing entirely, mouths of broken teeth. Sometimes the figures were bleeding, sometimes wearing grotesque smiles. One had been captioned The Dead Astronaut. The dead astronaut appeared repeatedly, with a tortured expression behind their helmet’s visor.

  At the back were a couple of separate sheets in Rory Bannatyne’s handwriting: lists of children, with their ages and whereabouts they lived. With these were the pictures torn from the Islander: the scouts, the junior divers, Petra Wade.

  Kane returned to his car, threw the file onto the passenger seat, and sat for a moment, staring at the antenna field. Then he began to drive.

  A few meters south of the BBC complex, he passed the police car heading in the opposite direction. Kane watched in his mirror as it stopped and turned around behind him. An arm emerged, flagging Kane down.


  There was no time to hide the file, so he slid it beneath the seat and prayed.

  12

  “Edward Pearce.”

  “Hi.”

  The officer leaned into Kane’s window, gray hair cropped close, face tanned, shades dark so Kane couldn’t see his eyes.

  “I’m John. We haven’t met.”

  They shook hands through the window.

  “I guess it was only a matter of time.”

  “Haven’t had a chance to welcome you to Ascension.”

  “I still can’t believe I’m actually here.”

  “You had some issues with the accommodation, I heard.”

  “Yes. It would be nice if the hotel stopped taking bookings, seeing as it doesn’t exist anymore. But people have been very helpful.”

  “I see you’ve acquired yourself a car.

  “Just now. From Terry, at One Boat. Drives better than it looks.”

  The officer straightened, looked around as if the oddness of the landscape had only just struck him.

  “What brought you up here?”

  “I heard it was a good beach.”

  “Not good enough to stick around?”

  “Just getting a feel.”

  “Where were you planning to go now?”

  “I’m not sure. Keep exploring. Get my bearings.”

  “Registered the car?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I know. Because you register it at the police station, and there’s only one person in there this morning and that’s me.” He smiled. With the shades on it was hard to gauge what the smile was meant to communicate. “Want to come in and do your paperwork?”