Author: F.G. Cottam
Date: 2012-01-02 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Fiction; Fantasy; Thriller; Supernatural; Paranormal; Ghosts; Suspense; Scotland
Description: For over a century, the mystery of the New Hope Island vanishing has intrigued and tantalized. How did a community of 150 souls disappear and leave no trace behind? As abruptly as the crew of the Mary Celeste, they went missing from their lonely Island in the Hebrides without a single clue as to the nature of their departure; doomed to remain an enigma forever. ...Until media magnate Alexander McIntyre decides to harness his prodigious energy and bottomless wealth in solving the New Hope mystery once and for all. He gathers a crack team of experts, sparing no expense in his pursuit of answers.
Publisher: Agora Books
Rights: Copyright 2018 F. G. Cottam. All rights reserved.

The Colony

F. G. Cottam

About the Author

F. G. Cottam (or Francis) was born and brought up in Southport in Lancashire, attending the University of Kent at Canterbury where he took a degree in history before embarking on a career in journalism in London. He lived for 20 years in North Lambeth and during the 1990s was prominent in the lad-mag revolution, launch editing FHM, inventing Total Sport magazine and then launching the UK edition of Men's Health. He is the father of a young son and baby daughter and now lives in Kingston upon Thames. His fiction is thought up over daily runs along the towpath between Kingston and Hampton Court Bridges.

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Also By F. G. Cottam

The House of Lost Souls

Dark Echo

The Magdalena Curse

The Waiting Room

Brodmaw Bay

The Memory of Trees

The Summoning

The Lazarus Prophecy

The Colony Trilogy

The Colony

Dark Resurrection

Harvest of Scorn

Novellas

An Absence of Natural Light

The Going and the Rise

The Colony

F. G. Cottam

This edition published in 2015 by Ipso Books

Ipso Books is a division of Peters Fraser + Dunlop Ltd

Drury House, 34-43 Russell Street, London WC2B 5HA

Copyright © F. G. Cottam, 2012

All rights reserved

You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Chapter One

McIntyre sat in his screening room with a single malt at his elbow and Mahler’s 9th unfurling around him through the concealed speakers housed in the ceiling and walls. He decided that he would switch the music off before watching the film again.

The original footage had been shot in the summer of 1934 and was silent. But he thought that his emotional reaction to what it showed might be influenced by the dramatic scale and melancholy character of his preferred soundtrack. He wanted to impose neutrality on the film. He wanted, if he was honest, to diminish what he had just watched. He wanted to do this before watching it again because it had unnerved him so badly.

The man with the cine camera had been a crofter named David Shanks. He had settled on New Hope Island in the spring of that year. He had not come from the humble, hardy stock which generally bred men who scraped a living off the Scottish land.

He was an ex-soldier. He had served with distinction as an officer in the Great War, earning a Military Cross fighting with an infantry battalion on the Ypres Salient. But after the conflict, he had led a platoon of Black and Tans in the Irish Rebellion and had been unable to reconcile his conscience to the things he had seen and done in the scorched earth campaign there against the rebel counties.

To McIntyre’s mind, Shanks had been a sort of prototype drop-out. Men like Robert Graves and Sassoon and Orwell had done the same thing in the same period with greater notoriety. But that was what Shanks was. He was someone who had rejected the conventions and strictures of life as lived by the majority of his middle-class contemporaries.

Instead, he had done itinerant jobs. He had crewed aboard a trawler for a while and worked manning a lighthouse. He had washed up eventually at New Hope Island, where his public school education and experience in the trenches had no doubt enabled him to dismiss with amused contempt the persistent stories of mischief and terror that blighted the place.

Less easily dismissed, was the evidence of the film. McIntyre had paid for the footage to be digitally enhanced. It now resided on a disc rather than a reel and showed its subject matter in greater detail than had been originally apparent. In McIntyre’s state-of-the-art DVD player, it could also be slowed down. He did not believe that the speed at which you watched it mattered greatly. The subject could not be made to look ordinary by altering the pace at which it progressed across the screen. Neither could it be made to appear more easily explicable.

He picked up his remote and switched off the Mahler. He steeled himself to watch the film again. And on the table bearing his whisky glass, the phone began to ring. He sighed and picked up the receiver.

‘Mr. McIntyre?’

‘I’m at your service, Mr. Lassiter.’

The sarcasm would be entirely lost on his researcher. McIntyre thought this was a pity. He was paying him handsomely. But Lassiter did not understand protocol and the notion of hierarchy was irritatingly alien to him. He spoke to McIntyre as though on the assumption that they were equals. McIntyre was confident he had yet to meet the man who could qualify as that. He tolerated Lassiter’s insubordinate tone. But only because he was capable of finding forgotten rarities such as the Shanks home movie. He had discovered it in a junk shop in Finchley. He was earning his retainer.

‘Have you watched it?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Oh.’ He sounded slightly crestfallen. ‘You’ve had it for a week.’

‘And I’m a very busy man. I have a business to run.’

‘More like a business empire.’

McIntyre liked compliments. He would throw the dog a bone. ‘I shall watch it tonight.’

‘Pour yourself a stiff one before you do.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with my nerves.’

‘Shanks would probably have said the same, Mr. McIntyre.’

‘Take me through the provenance.’

‘Do what?’

‘Convince me the film isn’t a fake.’

Footslogging had been the key to the find. Lassiter had followed the trail left by David Shanks though a peripatetic life. Scotland had evidently become less appealing to him after the New Hope Island experience. But he had still shown a predilection for remote and rugged country. He had lived for a while near Barmouth, on the Welsh coast. Then after the Second World War he had settled in a sort of commune in Cornwall run by a clique of abstract expressionist artists.

He had prospered there, running a bakery, with a weekend sideline in game fishing boat charters. That was where his son had been born, out of wedlock; the community he was part of remarkably free and easy about such things for the times. His son Peter had been born in 1948.

Shanks had not been much of a father. Something Lassiter was vague about had soured his relationship with the commune and with his common-law wife. He had left abruptly in the early 1960s and ironically, given his Black and Tan epiphany forty years earlier, had lived out his last years in a cottage at Liscannor Bay on the coast of County Clare in the West of Ireland.

He had died in 1970. He had never bothered to write a will. But he had amassed some savings and had owned the cottage in which he died. What few possessions he had possessed at the time of his death were eventually passed on to his son.

Peter had led a rather more humdrum life than his father. Despite his exotic childhood in Cornwall, he had grown up into a resolutely conventional man as far as career was concerned. He had become an insurance salesman, eventually running his own modest insurance firm from a small office in Camden. He had never married. He had commuted from his home in Finchley until late-stage lung cancer was diagnosed in 2008, when he was sixty. He had died in a privately run Finchley hospice.

This was where Lassiter’s intuition had come into play. A man without living relatives would rely on the hospice staff for favours in making his last months and then weeks bearable. There was generally someone on the staff roster of anywhere private ready to accommodate requests, albeit at a small profit.

Greed played a greater part than compassion in these transactions. A cautious man who’d made a living out of insurance would have put something by for his old age. But greed was no respecter of limitations. And Peter Shanks had been a dying man without anyone to leave his legacy to.

After two sessions in the pub along the road, timed to coincide with the change from afternoon to evening shift, Lassiter knew quite a lot about the hospice, its staff and the routine there. The word was that though the place was managed by a former civil servant with a diploma in business administration, it was really run by a handyman turned ward orderly called Gerry Sykes. He guessed that private sector pay in the field of full-time care for the terminally ill would run to about 18 grand a year. When he saw Sykes pull up in the hospice car park in a Range Rover less than a year old, he therefore thought he had his man.

Lassiter was not interested in the morality or legality of what Sykes was up to. He just wanted to trace any possessions that had been in Peter Shanks’ possession. Eighty years earlier, the film had caused a furore. It had generated national newspaper headlines and brought denunciation from church pulpits throughout Scotland. Now, though, it was forgotten about. Lassiter’s only interest was in discovering whether it still existed and in recovering it, if it did.

‘He left me a few bits and pieces, on account of my kindness to him,’ Sykes confirmed, once he’d established he wasn’t talking to an official from the Inland Revenue. ‘Some of them do. It’s no use to them when they’ve gone, is it?’

Absolutely not, Lassiter confirmed.

‘It was just a couple of boxes of junk, really, souvenirs, bric-a-brac. There was one nice set of silver candle holders. Everything else I gave to my brother-in-law. He has a junk shop here and does a stall at Camden Lock at the weekend.’

The cine camera had gone. But the film David Shanks had shot using it was still on a neglected shelf at the back of the shop, stored in circular metal containers, the alloy they were made from tarnished by time, but each tin encouragingly tightly sealed. They bore his initials and the dates the footage covered, in faded ink on strips of adhesive fabric. When Lassiter took them to the shop counter and paid for them with McIntyre’s expenses money, he was pretty sure that Peter Shanks had never even opened them, much less sat and viewed their contents on a screen.

Lassiter took the film straight from Finchley to a Soho processing facility where he kept an account. There, a technician he trusted opened the can dated 1934 and examining it between delicate fingers in white cotton gloves, said it was in excellent condition. Lassiter had him mount it on one of the old projectors they still kept for the purpose and he ran it, pulling it into focus.

Then he forced himself to watch it once again. Then he had it rolled carefully back into its original container. And he went for the stiff restorative drink he would, a week later, suggest McIntyre might benefit from, while viewing it.

It was Lassiter’s guiding belief that the deeper you dug, the more dirt you came up with. He had read a monograph about one of the painters prominent in the commune David Shanks had briefly prospered among on the Cornish coast. There had been some folkloric dabbling. It had progressed from the relative innocence of Morris Dancing to the making of corn dollies and the weaving of wicker shrines. Cornwall had been far more remote in the middle of the twentieth century than it was today. Its pagan traditions were then still fairly strong.

There was a veiled suggestion in the monograph that some of the commune’s members had gone rather too far than was proper or even safe with the rituals in which they had indulged. Had David Shanks been one of those? Had an unsavoury appetite for black magic been the reason for his hasty departure? There was nothing to suggest an interest in the occult in his earlier, military life.

But he had rebelled against the suffocating orthodoxies of Imperial Britain in the aftermath of the Great War. Others had done that by exploring magic. Crowley, of course, had been chief among them. Was its mysterious reputation the reason Shanks had gone to New Hope Island in the first place? Lassiter didn’t know. He thought, though, that Shanks had got more there than he’d bargained for. And he thought it had been an experience that would have deterred any sane man from looking any further.

‘The film is not a fake,’ Lassiter said.

His voice was emphatic over the line. McIntyre believed him. The fraudulent stuff was always easier to find. The people who counterfeited it wanted money or attention and were generally too impatient to hide what they manufactured so convincingly. Shanks’ film was genuine. It really had lain neglected on a junk shop shelf for a couple of years. It might never have been discovered there. And it wasn’t just Lassiter’s word. McIntyre had had the stock authenticated.

‘Did you call me for a particular reason?’

‘I just wanted your reaction to the film.’

‘You’re impertinent.’

‘I am curious, Mr. McIntyre. If I wasn’t curious, I wouldn’t be any good at my job.’

‘Nobody can say you’re not good at your job.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t call me again, Lassiter, until you’ve a fresh revelation for me.’ McIntyre hung up. He pressed the play button on his remote, but not until he had emptied his glass of the last of his whisky.

Across a vast Scottish island sky, summer clouds scudded and seabirds were caught in flight, in the black and white of cine film exposed to light through the eye of a lens looking at the world eighty years ago. The camera swung through 360 degrees and offered the first brief glimpse of the cottage. It was constructed from dry stone and whitewashed and McIntyre assumed that David Shanks had built it himself.

Next, he focussed on the sea, Atlantic waves tumbling onto a kelp littered shore glazed with sunlight. Further out, the restless whitecaps suggested a considerable swell. There was no sound to the film, of course. In the absence of the Mahler, McIntyre could imagine its elemental soundtrack, the tear of the summer wind and the gull cries and crashes of surf that would have accompanied the sights he was looking at. There would have been a salt tang to that breeze he could almost smell.

The camera panned left from the sea across the land and cottage towards a high and majestic crag and then back again, tentatively, because Shanks must have seen something not right in that second swift viewing of the usually familiar vista of his home.

He tracked back. The cottage came into view. He centred the image. Then he brought it into clearer relief. The figure in the cottage doorway clarified and sharpened and became a female child, a little girl attired in bed clothes from the period before children’s pyjamas had really been thought of, the time when they were put to rest as little adults in long night dresses and sleeping caps. So it was with this child.

But other things about her were different from the norm. The first was that she hung or floated a good foot off the ground. The blackness of the cottage interior was underneath her just as much as it was above her head and to either side in the doorway of her small frame. The second oddity was that her lips were pulled back from her stretched open mouth in a snarl of pure terror. Most unusual among her features, though, were her eyes. They were just black, empty sockets framed by the unruly blonde tresses emerging from beneath the cotton cap.

There was quite a lot of camera shake, by now. Shanks had been physically unnerved, filming this. The apparition moved. And this was the really shocking thing. It moved so fast it seemed to disappear. Shanks pulled the focus back to get some perspective on the movement. The figure tore across the screen and stopped abruptly.

Nothing human had ever shifted at such speed. McIntyre knew this for certain because he had paid a technician to calculate the velocity of the child’s travel across the space she covered in the film. She seemed to be looking for something, shuttling back and forth, stopping suspended there, a foot off the ground, bedraggled and inhuman, eighty years distant in time.

Then she turned her head slowly to the camera. The snarl shrank and was transformed under the sightless eyes into a smile, sly and knowing. And McIntyre assumed she had found what it was she was looking for. And Shanks came to the same conclusion and presumably he fled, because the film became a mad jumble of blurred images as he ran with the camera still strapped to his hand.

McIntyre switched off the DVD player and stood up and walked around the room. He knew that David Shanks had survived this encounter. He’d described it in a newspaper interview and he had later arranged a public showing of the film. It added a little colour and deepened slightly the existing mystery of New Hope Island. The film was persuasive. But press and public scepticism duly followed and with it scorn and ridicule and Shanks stopped talking about it and the film disappeared from public view and eventually, from collective memory.

Shanks had been too much the itinerant outsider to be thought really credible. His character had been dubious and he was not a Scot. The suspicion had been that he was an opportunist trying to profit from the Island’s ghoulish reputation.

His critics had not thought about the amount of labour Shanks had invested in building his cottage on that isolated rock. They remained unimpressed, as the years elapsed, by the detail that after taking flight on the day of the film in the rowing boat he had planned to fish from, he had never set foot on the island again.

The film was the problem, McIntyre thought. The film elevated the event from an anecdote into a genuine mystery. It was evidence of something.

McIntyre was almost tempted to call back Lassiter. An ex-detective with a Scotland Yard pedigree would have a view on the significance of the film, wouldn’t he?

He decided instead he would look at the history again. He would examine the known facts. In his mind, the New Hope Island Expedition, the scale and composition of it, was already taking shape. He had been pretty committed to it before the Shanks film. He was totally committed now.

It was the circulation builder his paper so desperately needed. The search for a definitive answer to the New Hope Island mystery was a story that would grip the world. He walked out of the screening room and into his adjacent library. He didn’t put the DVD back in its jewel case, though. Despite his usual punctilious neatness, he felt quite strongly that he didn’t really want to touch it again.

He gate-crashed the following morning’s editorial conference. He did not habitually do this. He was a benign ruler who did not generally meddle. He genuinely believed in the principle of editorial independence. He paid talented journalists and competent managers and he trusted that they knew better than he did all about the day to day running of the title that provided their livelihood.

But the circulation decline was relentless. The bottoming out predicted by Marsden, the editor, showed no sign it would happen this side of oblivion. He had diversified his media interests to the point where he was making money from the very websites allegedly to blame for killing newspapers off. But he cared in his heart about his flagship title. The other main participant in the conference was the features editor, James Carrick.

He had not slept well. That ragged little girl had found her voice in his dreams and it had been a shriek of malevolent grief that had shaken him awake half a dozen times and made him afraid in the end to close his eyes again in the darkness. Finally, at four in the morning, he had called Lassiter.

‘Yeah,’ Lassiter said, thickly, sounding like a man who drank himself nightly to sleep; ‘it scared the living shit out of me, too.’

McIntyre felt better after that. Lassiter wasn’t his equal, but he’d been a very good detective before opting for the easy life of early retirement. He’d been a tough and uncompromising copper. And the film had frightened him. He felt better. But he did not feel relaxed enough to drop off again before it got light. He thought if he closed his eyes he might open them on an urchin, ragged above the foot of his bed, staring sightlessly as she leered down at him.

‘We’re going to New Hope Island,’ he announced to the conference.

The response was a burst of clapping, sustained applause around the table, spontaneous, not ironic he did not feel, in the slightest degree.

‘Thank God,’ Marsden said.

McIntyre didn’t think now was the time to remind his editor about his bottoming out circulation theory. Evidently he was aware of its flaws. He turned to Carrick. ‘Far be it from me to teach you your job, James. But I want two stars on this, one for the factual stuff and a human interest specialist. We can back up with staffers but those two have to be names. This is going to cost a great deal of money and it has to have every ounce of impact we can wring from it.’

‘I’d say Lucy Church for the human interest,’ Carrick said. ‘I’d like a think about whoever else I assign.’

‘Good. Start thinking now.’

Marsden said, ‘What’s the timescale?’

‘Is a week long enough for teasers?’

‘Yes. With today’s net surf attention spans, a week is more than adequate. We’ll run the Island’s history and mystery over a spread tomorrow. We’ll flag it with a front page banner. I take it the personnel are lined up?’

‘The key players, yes,’ McIntyre said.

‘What’s the team strength?’

‘Six.’

‘Perfect,’ Marsden said. ‘We’ll run a biog of each of them, one every day with a quote from the subject, explaining what it is they hope to bring to the party.’

The conference progressed. Logistics were discussed. The possibility of spoilers in other papers was raised. But McIntyre had thought of that. The security personnel positioned to repel nosy competitors would be in place on the island over the coming days. One of the great mysteries of recent centuries was about to be investigated and with any luck, solved.

The team would include a virologist and a forensic archaeologist. They were also going to send a self-styled expert on alien abduction and a well-respected medium. The personnel assembled covered every eventuality. McIntyre knew which of them he had his money on, but he wasn’t saying publicly.

The subject of the Shanks film did not come up. He wanted to keep the conference mood upbeat. He had intended to mention it, but the general atmosphere had been so positive, it would have been like raining on his own parade. Besides, he was supposed to be the one with answers, not questions.

And the film provoked uneasiness in him. He could neither explain it, nor rationalise the fear that watching it provoked. So he didn’t bring it up. Later, much later, Alexander McIntyre was to regard this as the biggest mistake of his life.

Chapter Two

It was almost lunchtime before the conference was concluded. He had arranged to have lunch alone at his club. The paper occupied a bold new glass and steel headquarters at Borough, overlooking the river. It was a pleasant day.

He decided he would walk along the river into the West End to give himself an appetite. On the way he was hardly aware of the bright water traffic or the culture hungry tourists he passed on the Southbank. He thought instead about his reading of the previous evening and the enigmatic Scottish island that had fascinated him since boyhood.

Seamus Ballantyne was the captain of a slave ship in the golden period when the British mercantile fleet made forty-percent of its total income from that profitable trade. He made most of his fortune in the 1790s, at the time when Wilberforce and the abolitionists were at their most vocal in decrying the trade and condemning British involvement.

He could not have been unaware of the controversy. The clamour made by the abolitionists in parliament and elsewhere was too great. There would have been pamphlets pressed upon him as he walked the streets of his native Liverpool between voyages. He would have seen their signs of protest pasted to the pillars of the port wharves.

When he repented, he did so without warning or preamble, in 1799. Ballantyne renounced slavery almost a decade before the bill was passed that abolished British participation in the trade. He became a preacher. He was charismatic and persuasive and over the next decade, developed a following that became a devoted congregation.

In 1810 he announced that he was to build a new community on a remote Island off Scotland’s Atlantic coast. When he departed on this adventure, he took 160 devout followers with him on the journey. They would live on a barren rock in the Outer Hebrides. God would care for them. Their industry and faith would find His reward. They would christen their windswept, granite home New Hope.

And for 15 years, the community thrived. At first, it did so purely on a subsistence level. Then a trade of sorts developed. Sheep were bred and wool was gathered and spun and the resultant garments sold. Whisky was distilled. And then the people of New Hope Island simply vanished.

No bodies were ever washed up on the mainland. There was no wreckage from boats. When curious neighbours went to investigate, they found the dwellings of the community intact. There was food on the tables and recent fires in their hearths. Books were left open at the page their readers had reached. The domestic beasts still grazed what little pasture land they had. But there were no people. Every man, woman and child had gone without trace.

To Alexander McIntyre, media magnate billionaire and ardent believer in extraterrestrial life, the answer to the question of what had happened was as obvious as the solution to the mystery of the Marie Celeste. He believed the same fate had met the crew of that ship as had befallen the New Hope community.

Privacy was the hallmark of alien abduction. There were probably many other unrecorded examples down the centuries. But the clue was obvious, wasn’t it? The visitors did not welcome witnesses when they took the humans away. New Hope had met those ideal conditions, in which they liked to harvest, perfectly.

He had to admit that the troubling apparition caught by David Shanks’ cine camera did not easily fit into this scenario. But it would. When they got to New Hope and his team began to put the pieces of the picture together, the floating girl would find a place in it all somewhere.

What had made Ballantyne tick? McIntyre wondered had the ship’s captain turned religious leader kept a diary on New Hope? He must have been in the habit of keeping a log from his old profession. A diary would only have been the natural expression of what McIntyre suspected had been a substantial ego. What a find that would be, if it still existed to be unearthed.

James Carrick briefed Lucy Church after lunch.

‘This story will cost him a fortune to orchestrate,’ Lucy said, after Carrick had told her about the array of experts on board and the security team already on their way to New Hope.

‘I think it will show a profit,’ Carrick said. ‘It’s a world exclusive.’

‘Only if it’s got the legs to run,’ she said.

‘It’s your job to help give it the legs. I want a thousand words for tomorrow’s edition on the human tragedy of the lost pioneers. Or lost apostles, or missionaries or whatever you think calling them will generate the most sympathy.’

She smiled at him. ‘Did you ever have a single thought that wasn’t a cliché, James?’

‘Not knowingly,’ he said.

‘It’s hard enough to evoke sympathy for last week’s earthquake victims. The whole world has compassion fatigue, our dwindling readership in particular. It’s almost impossible to humanise a community that died out two hundred years ago.’

‘Particularise it. Take a single family, a single child. We’ll illustrate it with contemporary etchings of swaddled babies with dimpled cheeks and cute milkmaids. Hand carved crosses above infant peasant graves bearing pitiful misspellings.’

‘For God’s sake, James.’

‘Quote some really sentimental poetry or a folk ballad from the period about someone’s lost sweetheart.’

‘You’re teaching me to suck eggs.’

‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘If you can’t do it, Lucy, no one can.’

She grimaced. Although she was concealing it well, she was actually thrilled to be going to New Hope. It was summer, so the days would be long and the nights short and, she hoped, the weather merciful. The fact that Carrick had hand picked her for the job was a testament to her own political skill.

On her arrival at the paper nine months earlier, he had judged her on her leather jacket and jeans and her American Spirit cigarettes and the Zippo lighter she habitually lit them with. He really did think in clichés, which could be an asset in a features editor. But he had categorised her as a flinty exhibitionist.

She felt she had a right to her own dress code and bad habits and her own personality too. Being a journalist was no longer the respected profession it had once been, but neither was it penal servitude. She had a talent for empathy. She had it because she genuinely liked and was interested in real people. She was intrigued by their diversity and sometimes inspired by their independence and courage.

Send her to interview a brainless celebrity and the resulting piece would lie dead on the page. Send her to interview a Moss Side paramedic or a soldier maimed by a roadside IED in Afghanistan and she would return with something memorable. People sensed that she wasn’t just going through the motions with them and responded to that. There was nothing voyeuristic about her reportage. It had taken a while for this penny to drop with Carrick, but the New Hope assignment was solid proof that it finally had.

The array of experts recruited for the expedition was termed by Carrick, a team. That was a description Lucy thought likely to prove a hopeless misnomer. Each of them would compete to provide the most plausible and compelling answer to the mystery. That was only human nature.

It was her experience that highly qualified people were generally vain. In competition with other highly qualified people in other fields, they were likely to become hostile and insecure. She thought the resultant antics likely to make entertaining copy.

‘Are you going to have to shift a lot of domestic stuff around to make the trip?’

‘You mean am I screwing anyone?’

‘I don’t necessarily mean that.’

‘You know I’m not married, James. And you know I have no children to arrange care for. So I think that’s exactly what you mean.’

Carrick rewarded her with a blush. It wasn’t the full beetroot, but it was there.

‘Shame on you,’ she said. ‘Really, James, when I’ve met your wife and everything.’

She felt good teasing him. He’d given her a hard time on the basis of prejudice and preconception. It was both revenge and a bit of fun. She was in a very good mood. She was really excited at the idea of the expedition and not just because of the human interest angle.

She had been fascinated by the New Hope Island mystery since first reading about it as a little girl. She had come across the story at the age of eight in an old copy of Readers Digest. She had kept that issue, almost wearing it out studying and re-studying the account of the disappearance, its inexplicable abruptness, its enduring questions and the total failure of anyone to come up with a plausible explanation.

It had not frightened her. Not even the creepy anecdote at the end about the war hero crofter spooked by an apparition on the Island in the 1930s had frightened her. It had stayed in her memory, though. She had never forgotten it.

‘I’d better go and make a start on that piece,’ she said, looking at her watch.

‘Break a leg,’ Carrick said.

It was Paul Napier’s considered view that the five blokes he had the misfortune to be among were complete idiots. They had made the crossing aboard a chartered boat. He supposed it had once been a trawler, before the EU fishing quotas forced the men who hauled the nets to find another occupation.

The bloke in the wheelhouse had to be an ex-trawler man. You could tell by his attitude to the cold. He didn’t feel it. Sure it was June, but it was also the Atlantic Ocean, with the Scottish mainland dwindling in the distance. They were well north and the onshore wind was brisk. Yet their steersman had manned the wheel wearing a pair of Levis and a T-shirt.

Four of the blokes, the four who looked like failed nightclub bouncers, spent the crossing puking over the gunwale. They stared at the water as they did so with increasingly glassy eyes, watching it roll greenly and so making their sea sickness worse. Napier did not offer them any constructive advice on the subject. He was too disgusted at their inexperience.

The fifth idiot was their leader, Captain Blake. He insisted on the title of Captain, even though his regular forces days were a long way behind him and security was a low-rent, civilian occupation, largely the province of men like those who’d done the puking. There was no prestige, no honour, bugger-all camaraderie and not much money to compensate for the other indignities when you got your pay at the end of the month.

Blake had made the crossing with his lips pursed and a sour expression wrinkling his nose. Napier thought he was probably disappointed he wasn’t in the prow of a rigid inflatable with a Heckler and Koch nestled between his hands.

After they had navigated the breakwater and docked, Napier and Blake had to do most of the gear unloading because the others were too weakened by puking to help. They sat on the cobbled quay, retching and gobbing and generally getting their land legs back while the boat skipper helped the two of them still able-bodied to recover their stuff from the hold.

There was a crofter’s cottage on the Island, they had seen an aerial reconnaissance photo of it at the briefing. There were remaining huts from the original settlement that could also have provided shelter. But all of these structures formed parts of the site and they were under strict instructions not to contaminate the site. So they needed their tents, because the nights in the exposure of this low lying island could be cold enough to inflict hypothermia, even in the summer months.

Blake took out a compass. In a minute, Napier thought, he’s going to take out a tube of cam cream and start to smear it over his face.

‘What do you reckon, Napier?’

‘I reckon it’s almost dark, Captain.’ They had been forced to wait for the gale force weather of the morning to blow itself out before crossing. ‘I’d say we’ve got another half an hour or so of light. We should choose a piece of high ground and rig the tents before we lose it altogether.’

Blake gestured towards the men on the cobbles with a flick of his head. He nodded towards a gentle embankment a hundred metres away with another. ‘These boys can erect the tents and then recover with a brew. We’ll walk the Island perimeter. Arriving at night is never ideal unless it’s an assault you’ve got planned.’

Napier wondered what they might assault. Perhaps Blake was thinking puffins.

‘We should patrol the island perimeter. What say you?’

I hate everything about this fucker, Napier thought. I even hate his fucking phraseology. What he said was, ‘Your call, Captain.’

The island was roughly diamond shaped. The makeshift harbour where they had disembarked, and it was very makeshift, was naturally to the East, facing the direction of the mainland forty miles away. Given that the prevailing winds were westerly, it was the most sheltered spot the island offered for docking. The settlement of New Hope was at the Island’s centre, on ground that was exposed because it was relatively high. But the original settlers had needed the drainage gravity provided. So they had been obliged to tolerate the exposure of their hamlet to the elements.

David Shanks’ ill-fated crofter’s cottage was at the southern apex of the island. Sunlight had been his logic. He had anticipated growing things and the sun shone longest and brightest there. As Blake led their counter-clockwise trudge around New Hope, Napier wondered had shell-shock or battle trauma generally not clouded Shanks’ judgement of his prospects. This place was surely too bleak to endure living on alone.

The sods were soft under Napier’s booted feet. ‘There’s peat here,’ he said, surprised. The sea was to his right. In the darkening light it looked almost purple and gnarled with foam at its crests and altogether gigantic.

‘You don’t like me much, do you?’ Blake said.

Napier thought the suggestion that he might like Captain Bollocks even a tiny little bit totally outrageous. He also thought it wise to keep his own counsel. He needed this job. He had fucked up a lot of jobs in quick succession and badly needed the money from this one, piss-poor as it was.

‘Marines and Paratroopers, Captain,’ Napier said. ‘The rivalry’s a tradition.’

‘That would be Royal Marines,’ Blake said.

Proving my point, Napier thought, you twat. The ground was surprisingly tricky underfoot. It was inconsistent. It was almost shifty in its character, he thought. It betrayed your weight.

‘I don’t give a shit whether you like me or not,’ Blake said. ‘It’s immaterial. Just don’t let the animosity interfere, Napier. Those four jokers we left struggling with the physics of a couple of frame tents back at the camp are about as useless as useless gets. If push comes to shove, watch my back and I’ll watch yours. Okay?’

‘With you all the way on that one, Captain,’ Napier said. And he was. Blake was right. The Sea Sick Four, as they would now remain collectively in his mind, were worse than useless.

It was fully dark now and not really dark at all. The sky was vast, moon and starlight reflected back off the glittering water of the ocean, the land mass relatively flat and so space all around them and this naked, empty exposure illuminated by a sort of monochromatic light.

It was a place like no other he had experienced before. On the skin, with the temperature and wind and salt prick, it felt a bit like parts of Scandinavia he had been to on manoeuvres back in the day. But you were never far from the scent and shade of trees in Norway and he had seen no trees at all so far on New Hope.

They walked. They did so in silence. But the silence felt slightly more companionable than it had. Napier had not exactly bonded with Blake, you did not bond with a man like Captain Bollocks, but their shared contempt for the Sea Sick Four elevated them to a level of shared professionalism and was at least one thing they could get through this particular job without arguing about.

He could not have said at what point he became aware of the music. It sort of insinuated itself into his mind to the extent where he was almost singing along with it before it consciously impinged upon his hearing, rather than just his thoughts.

He stopped. ‘Hear that?’

Blake stopped in front of him. Napier saw the Captain’s shoulders tense. He was missing his firearm. He was a man who, in civilian life, always would. ‘I don’t hear anything. What is it?’

Maybe it was drifting on the wind from a fishing boat out there, Napier thought. Sound could carry without distortion an improbably long way over the sea. It could travel for a dozen miles with uncanny clarity. But it wasn’t coming from that direction, was it? It was coming from a spot just over a ridge to his left, to landward. And with a feeling of something akin to dread, Napier knew that he recognised the song.

‘Answer me, Napier,’ Blake said, ‘what do you think you can hear?’ His voice was low and urgent.

Napier walked up close to him. ‘Song,’ he murmured, ‘the sound of a human voice. Listen.’

Blake did. Then he shook his head impatiently. Very quietly, he said, ‘It’s your imagination.’

But Napier knew that it wasn’t. ‘I’m a Kate Rusby fan,’ he said.

‘Never heard of her.’

‘She’s a folk singer, the Barnsley Nightingale. Don’t you like music?’

Blake shrugged. ‘Phil Collins,’ he said, ‘a bit of Whitney.’

But what Napier was hearing wasn’t Phil Collins or Whitney. It was a folk ballad. Kate Rusby sang a lot of old ballads and sea shanties. The one Napier recognised now was called The Recruited Collier. It had been written during the Napoleonic Wars. But it wasn’t Kate singing it. It was being sung unaccompanied by a male voice in a sly and insinuating croon from the other side of the ridge. The melody wavered. The voice had a confidential quality that made it unpleasant to listen to. There was a repellent insistence to it as it quietly repeated the chorus.

‘I’ll take a look,’ Napier said. He did not really want to. He had never believed in phantoms. But he dreaded what he might see over the lip of that rise. It was the accent the singer pronounced the phrases in. It was the dialect of a remote time, when the song was still fresh. Napier was sure of it. After the two centuries elapsed since then, he did not think the singer would look fresh at all.

He climbed the tussocks carefully and peered over the edge of the ground and down as the song was snatched away from his ears, at nothing. There was a smell, though. There was just the faintest hint of tobacco. He looked around. The ground seemed undisturbed. Blake came over the ridge and joined him.

‘Can you smell anything?’

Blake sniffed the air. ‘Salt,’ he said, ‘peat. If I didn’t know better, soldier, I’d say you’ve been at the bottle.’

‘It’s a long time since I was a soldier,’ Napier said. This was not strictly true, not in years. Chronologically, it was an exaggeration. But there was an emotional truth to it. He had sunk so far in his circumstances and self-esteem that it felt like a long time. He had not been at the bottle, though. And he still trusted his senses. ‘The island is totally uninhabited, right?’

‘Totally,’ Blake said. ‘Nobody has lived here since a crofter fled the place spooked eighty years ago. You know that. You were there for the briefing.’

Napier nodded. He had been there for the briefing. Phil Collins and Whitney, he thought. Christ. And almost certainly Lionel Ritchie and Maria Carey and Celine Dion as well.

The Recruited Collier was a song about a young man pressed into military service when drunk and subsequently brutalised by war, thriving on battle, ever more callous and bloodthirsty as his sweetheart laments his absence and the changes in him. It had been written in a cruel age, when a child could be hanged for stealing a sheep and the penalty for poaching was transportation in the hold of a ship to the other side of the world in chains.

That was the time of New Hope Island, wasn’t it? That was its period, when there had been people here and life and no doubt a bit of occasional singing and carousing. Napier had heard a ghost. He was certain of it. The grass trembled blackly in the breeze under his feet and he heard the night waves crash and tumble on the shore a hundred feet away and he knew he was in a haunted place. He thought of the last line of the song:

As I lie in my cold, cold bed,
of the single life I’m weary

Napier shivered. Captain Bollocks treated him to a manly slap on the back.

Lassiter always tried to get to seven o’clock in the evening before indulging in his first drink of the day. The first drink did not deliver enjoyment. It was many years since he could honestly have claimed that. It brought relief. It answered a need in him. He had a drink problem and admitted it to himself but considered the problem more chronic than acute.

He thought that if he stopped drinking, he might stop functioning. He was sober in the day. Alcohol did not interfere with his intuition or deductive powers. He could not scrape by on his early pension, not without making lifestyle sacrifices. The practical solution was to continue to indulge. Less and less, though, was he making it to seven o’clock before seeking the relief of that first drink the Irish called the healer.

Everyone had a vice. Everyone concealed a weakness. His years in the Met had taught him nothing, if they had not taught him that. The exception to the rule seemed to be his current employer, Alexander McIntyre.

As far as Lassiter had been able to determine, McIntyre ran his companies in an honest and judicious way. He gave generously to charities. More, he was pro-active in fund raising for a variety of good causes. He was entirely self-made, but had not scrambled over the corpses of business rivals to get to the top. His past and present colleagues and rivals had nothing but good things to say about him.

Yet there was something else. There was something at the core of McIntyre’s life, some governing passion that gave him his energy and focus and was the real reason for this whole New Hope Island project. There was some secret agenda, wasn’t there? Something McIntyre was not coming clean about to the rest of the people involved.

The project made perfect commercial sense. It would deliver the paper new readers. It would stick it to their rival titles. It would generate sensational publicity for the man himself. But that wasn’t the whole of it. Lassiter had not got to the bottom of why McIntyre was really doing this and it was a point of pride with him that he did.

These thoughts occupied him on the drive from his flat in Waterloo to the house in West Hampstead where he planned to do something for which McIntyre would probably have sacked him on the spot. But he had been very troubled by the Shanks film. He had not slept well since viewing it a week before. His booze intake had risen substantially just to enable him to get a decent night’s rest which, because it was drink induced, was actually nothing of the sort.

And the flat itself had become sort of accident prone. Lassiter lived the pristine domestic existence of the life-long bachelor. He demanded cleanliness and neatness of his own home environment. His fridge and cooker were spotless. His polished floors shone. There was no dust to finger on the component lids of his expensively assembled audio system. His bathroom still possessed a showroom gleam. And things had started to go wrong.

Taps ran he could not remember having turned on. Twice this had happened at night, robbing him of precious rest. He discovered rogue rings burning away on his gas cooker. Things had gone missing; books, keys, his mobile and just yesterday, his wallet. He found them again, but not where he thought he might have misplaced them. He didn’t misplace things, he was too meticulous. When he found these objects, it was almost with the suspicion that they had been deliberately hidden.

Lassiter believed that there was more to life than what was concrete. He thought this belief probably contradicted much of the rest of his nature. But he could not ignore the compelling evidence he had seen in his own career. He had been involved in two murder investigations, child killings both, where they had drawn a despairing blank in seeking the evidence to nail the men they strongly suspected were the culprits.

On both occasions they had benefited from some unorthodox assistance. A psychic called Alice Lang had come forward claiming that she could help them in overcoming the obstacle blocking their investigation. She could lead them to evidence that would get them the conviction they were so desperate to achieve.

She was not some elderly crank, some lonely old loser hankering after the spotlight. She was good looking and glamorous, a successful practicing psychiatrist who had only gone to them because her conscience demanded she share information that had simply come to her, arriving uninvited in her mind. If anything, she helped reluctantly, scared of compromising her own professional credentials and reputation.

She had been plausible enough on the first occasion for them to act on the information. On the second occasion, they had needed no convincing. Alice Lang possessed the gift of second-sight. Lassiter knew and trusted her. He did not like the recent disruption afflicting his home. It was why he was on his way now to see her with the Shanks film transferred to DVD in a jewel case on his front passenger seat. He was a man who always wanted answers. This time, though, the need for them seemed to have become both urgent and personal.

Chapter Three

McIntyre never allowed guests to his house to enter his study. It was a room kept locked. He did not even allow his cleaner to dust it. He did that himself. His interest in matters extraterrestrial would have been obvious to anyone examining the room even cursorily. It wasn’t just the books, rows of shelves of them, each one speculating on the possibility of alien life. He subscribed to a number of magazines that discussed and debated the subject. He had framed photographs on the walls of some of the more celebrated UFO sightings. He had framed photos of some that weren’t so celebrated, too. For these, he had paid very handsomely.

The costliest items in the room were not the pictures, though. He had corresponded seriously with two former NASA scientists on the technology of rocketry and the logistics of interplanetary space travel. He had questioned what a craft capable of that magnitude of voyage would look like. They offered to build him a model, predicated on the aliens it carried being humanoid.

McIntyre always quietly assumed the aliens would be slightly altered versions of the human being. Humans were the pinnacle of the evolutionary process and he could not imagine the process being so radically different on life-friendly other worlds. The idea of little green men or intelligent creatures built like giant lobsters, the stuff of Dr Who episodes, did not repel him. He just thought the notion absurd.

He was not an Area 51 conspiracy theorist. He had seen the so-called autopsy pictures allegedly taken then and thought them clumsily laughable fakes. Suspicion and paranoia did not inform his belief in aliens. Rather it came from a profound and optimistic belief that mankind had allies in the cosmos as yet unknown to it. He thought that wherever Ballantyne’s pilgrims had been taken to, they had enjoyed a far more comfortable and interesting life than would have been the case on their hostile and isolated lump of Atlantic granite.

In the end, his ex-NASA correspondents had been unable to agree on the fundamentals of the design of an alien spacecraft. And so he had commissioned them both individually to build him a model of one.

He had them in pride of place on his desk in his secret room and he pondered often on their design, wondering which of their contrasting shapes the ship he was destined to see and perhaps even travel on would most closely, between the two, resemble.

The models had cost him a lot of money. They had been a rich man’s extravagance. But he was a rich man, wasn’t he? And no bauble acquired in his adult life had given him so much pleasure or stimulated his mind so much as those two intricate, beautifully realised, three-dimensional speculations had.

He sat in his study. He looked at the models on his desk. He thought again about the ghoulish apparition of the eyeless girl in the footage shot on New Hope by David Shanks, having just then come to a firm and resolute conclusion about the film.

It had nothing whatever to do with the earlier and greater mystery. It was not connected in any way to the vanishing. Aliens had taken Ballantyne’s pilgrims, he was as sure of that as he was determined to discover the proof.

Shanks had brought that apparition with him to the Island. It had followed him. Unless, that was, he had conjured it there afresh. He’d had an interest in magic, was an occult practitioner. He had been exiled from the Cornish artistic community later in his life for the very same transgression of dabbling in the dark arts. It was probably why he had ended up in County Clare, a western Irish county then so remote and meagrely populated that he could indulge his mischievous appetite for curses and corn dollies without a neighbour to notice or take exception.

The film was genuine. And it was quite a coup to have something genuinely other-worldly captured on celluloid. But it was nothing to do with the New Hope Island vanishing and McIntyre was glad about that. It meant he would have to endure the prospect of viewing that abomination no more. It meant he could forget about it.

He would direct Lassiter to concentrate on Seamus Ballantyne himself. He did not know anything like enough about Ballantyne’s formal education or cultural inclinations. He wanted to know what the probability was of the reformed slave vessel master having kept a diary or journal. If he had, it might be stashed under the ground on New Hope, as he had earlier suspected and half-hoped. Equally, though, could it be under dust on a neglected shelf somewhere at the archive in the Maritime Museum in Liverpool?

He knew that the logical thing to have done at this point would be to charge a historian with the mission of finding it. But it was essentially detective work, wasn’t it? And Lassiter had been a bloody good copper. And Lassiter, handsomely paid, did not have a historian’s fastidious scruples when it came to appropriating sources. If he found something of interest and value to the man paying his wages he would lift it, without quibble.

McIntyre did have one urgent dilemma to confront. It concerned exclusivity. The stature of newspapers as breakers of news had been undermined by the internet perhaps, in the long run, fatally.

Logic suggested two possibilities. One was to set up live webcam newsfeeds and dedicate a substantial section of the paper’s website to the moment by moment progress of the expedition. His marketing experts had said the increase in traffic was likely to be exponential. The other tactic would be to launch a dedicated website concentrating wholly on the expedition and its findings. The marketing people were very enthusiastic about that option because it dispensed with any confusion, always a good thing faced with the limited attention spans and intellect of the average web surfer.

McIntyre planned to implement neither internet option. The paper would get this story as a genuine, old fashioned rolling exclusive. He had been advised by his own web people that no one was prepared in the modern age to wait for 24 hours for a news update. The download culture demanded it now, at the click of a mouse or use of an app on an internet friendly phone. But he planned to give them no choice in the matter. If they wanted answers about the New Hope Island mystery, and he planned to ensure they would, people would have to buy and read the paper. Maybe it was a foolhardy approach. His instinct told him it wasn’t.

The website could cover the run-up. He wanted maximum exposure and as much cross-media hype as could be generated for that. But once the expedition members touched down on New Hope, anyone wanting to follow their progress would be obliged to buy a copy of the Chronicle to do so.

He should call Karl Cooper. He had mentioned the Shanks apparition to Cooper and Cooper had been non-committal about it. He should tell him about the conclusion he had reached on its lack of real relevance. Karl was his expert on alien abduction, an astro-physicist by training, a cosmologist who argued that benevolent alien civilisations had been watching us and watching over us, for millennia.

He shared McIntyre’s own conviction about what had occurred on New Hope. He said that the relative integrity of the site meant that the evidence would still be there for them to find. He was genuinely confident of that.

He would call Cooper and then he would call Lassiter and get him moving on Ballantyne. He looked at the models on his desk. He picked them up, raising one in either hand, examining their clever engineering, their bright and seductive intricacies, in the light of his halogen desk lamp. His ex-wife, in whom he regretted having confided his theories, had dismissed them as toys. They would see about that. The clock was ticking down, wasn’t it? He could not remember having felt so excited since his childhood.

Alice Lang was elegant in a grey flannel suit, her lower half encased in its pencil skirt, her long legs tucked sideways beneath the armchair in which she sat. She was smoking. She was perfectly entitled to do so, Lassiter thought. It was her house they were in.

‘I’m concerned about you.’

He shrugged.

‘You don’t have the self-esteem you did in the job. I could see it in your posture the moment I opened the door to you.’

‘Well, I didn’t have a warrant card to flash.’ He smiled. ‘They give you a bit of authority.’

‘Yes, as does the rank of Detective Inspector.’

He shrugged again. He did not reply.

‘You’re struggling in civilian life, aren’t you, Patrick?’

‘We should discuss the film,’ Lassiter said.

‘I suspect you’re drinking too much.’

‘Guilty as charged,’ he said. ‘But I’m not on the couch, Alice. I’m not your patient, or subject or whatever. I want to know what you thought of the film.’

‘Well, I’m smoking.’

‘You are, unarguably.’

‘I gave up smoking seven months ago. It’s genuine, isn’t it?’

‘You tell me.’

‘It doesn’t work like that, Patrick. The first time I helped you, the O’Grady case?’

‘Yes?’

‘I went to the boy’s house, like one of those ghouls who treats a murder scene as a shrine to which they feel obliged to pay a pilgrimage. I went to the house and put my hand on the brass door knocker. And that was when I knew.’

Lassiter thought for a moment. ‘The camera has long gone,’ he said. ‘The original film is vacuum sealed to preserve it wrapped in special packaging in a strongbox in a vault somewhere. Probably Coutts Bank, if I know McIntyre, or one of those secure facilities in Knightsbridge or Mayfair beloved of secretive billionaires. I can get you the container the original film was stored in.’

‘You know that David Shanks touched it?’

Lassiter nodded. ‘He labelled it. He had it in his possession from the time he shot the footage until his death. It housed the film for all that time.’

‘What kind of man was Shanks?’

‘Elusive. I don’t think he ever really recovered from his experiences in the Great War. He was in the infantry at Ypres. He kept it together well enough to become a decorated soldier. But that wasn’t an achievement he built on in his life. He seems to have spent most of his time running away. There’s some suggestion of involvement with the occult.’

‘I’ve heard of New Hope Island. I suppose everyone has. The apparition seemed to be dressed in period clothes.’

‘He could have been an innocent witness to a paranormal event. He could have conjured or summoned the apparition in some way. If it is faked, it was very cleverly faked. The original film has not been tampered with.’

‘Why would he fake it?’

‘To raise money showing and talking about it, but the theory doesn’t stand up. He spent too much time and effort building the cottage on the island. And he was a loner, not a showman. He was on New Hope in the first place because he liked isolation. That was a consistent factor throughout his whole life.’

She pulled heavily on her cigarette and exhaled. It was obvious to him that Dr Lang had really enjoyed smoking, before her successful attempt to quit. Under the glamour and serenity, he suspected that she was quite highly strung, as anyone with her unwanted gift would be.

‘I can’t promise anything. But if you give the film container to me, if I can handle it, something helpful might occur to me.’

Lassiter rose to go. He had already taken the DVD from her player and put it in his pocket in its case. It felt intrusive and awkward there, too big for the space it occupied, almost as though the two-dimensional image it bore had a three-dimensional life. ‘When,’ he said, ‘shall I come?’

‘I need to go into town this afternoon. You live in town, don’t you?’

‘My flat is in Waterloo.’

‘Don’t come to me, Patrick. I’ll come to you.’

Two things occurred to him when she said that. The first was that he could not remember the last time he had received a domestic visitor. Apart from utilities people, no one ever came to the flat. It was an indictment, really. It was an admission of his social and personal inadequacy.

His second conclusion was no more comfortable and was a copper’s intuition. She would come to him because she did not want the film can in her house. She would help him for old time’s sake. But she had considered the apparition on the screen an abomination, hadn’t she?

She paused on the doorstep, showing him out. She blinked in the bright sunlight of the afternoon and opened her mouth as though to say something and then closed it again, the well-shaped lips pressed firmly together, having apparently changed her mind concerning the wisdom of saying anything at all.

His mobile rang. McIntyre’s name appeared on the display. He stopped in the street and answered it.

Several books had been written about the New Hope enigma. The principle theories about the disappearance were mass suicide and some kind of disease epidemic. In a weird reverse take on Ballantyne’s earlier career, one theory held that the whole population of the island had been abducted and sold into slavery.

Lucy Church favoured the suicide theory. The idea of women walking into the sea with their children held in their arms was a morbid one. And no bodies had been recovered, washed up on the coast of the Scottish mainland. But the other hypotheses made even less sense. Atlantic currents could have taken bodies out to sea where they would have been food for the ocean’s scavengers.

Her first New Hope piece had appeared in that morning’s edition, which broke the news about the expedition in a front page lead story. She had personalised what she had written in the way discussed the previous afternoon with Carrick. She had concentrated on the children. Their school had been a simple hut made from driftwood and tarred canvas. After the disappearance, the books had still lain open on the tea chests the pupils had used as desks. They had been reading Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, but had never got to finish the story.

Their oilskins had still hung on their schoolroom pegs when they vanished. Lucy speculated in her piece on whether they had lived to reach adulthood. It seemed extremely doubtful. But there was the remote possibility that Ballantyne had moved his people on to another location without sharing his plans with the people they traded with or anyone else.

Their destination would have needed to be impossibly remote and he would have required a large vessel, or a convoy of smaller ones, in order to transport the entire community. But Lucy felt that she had to speculate on survival in her piece. Poignancy was good, but the idea of a classroom of seven and eight year olds all just perishing at once, was far too bleak.

Carrick had dropped by her desk an hour before to say that early reaction to her feature had been very positive. The breaking story of the expedition had raised single copy sales in their rough early estimate by 25 per cent. Most of the national radio and television news programmes were doing pieces on the New Hope mystery and this ambitious effort finally to solve it. They were getting massive airtime in Scotland, of course.

Lucy’s task for the day was to write up a profile of one of the expedition’s team of experts. It was the virologist Dr Jane Chambers. She was one of the most brilliant specialists in her field. She was also stylish, good-looking and a shrewd self-publicist, Lucy thought, who had maximised her assets to achieve a high-profile and probably quite lucrative sideline in science based television. There wasn’t time for a face to face. She rang her on her hospital department extension at 2.15, the agreed time, and made do with a brief phone interview.

‘Do you have a thesis about the disappearances?’

‘I have a theory.’

‘Would you care to share it, Doctor?’

She heard her subject draw in an audible breath. ‘Pen poised?’

‘I’m taping this.’

‘Okay. We are talking about a time when cholera and typhus virtually wiped out entire villages in England and in continental Europe too, for that matter. Disease was more often fatal than not. They simply didn’t have the medical knowledge or resources to cope with it. Bad diet and poor hygiene undermined their immune systems. In modern times, think of the 1980s, before the retro-viral drugs, when an HIV diagnosis was a death sentence. In the early 19th century a whole range of infections were just as deadly.’

‘Would there not have been graves?’

‘I think there is one, a mass grave. It just hasn’t been located yet. Whatever hit them spread with the speed of the Black Death and they buried their dead in the same way as they did during that epidemic. It was very virulent. We’ll find a plague pit, Ms Church. I will stake my reputation on it.’

‘How do you think the outbreak began?’

‘My guess would be that there was a carrier. My money would be on that being Seamus Ballantyne himself. He’d travelled to Africa and the West Indies, hadn’t he, in his occupation as a sea captain. I think he brought something deadly back in his blood and passed the infection on.’

‘Why were there no bodies?’

‘I’ve told you, there are bodies. They just haven’t been found. There’s a plague pit on New Hope Island.’

‘But Ballantyne was a carrier in your hypotheses. He didn’t get infected. And others must have helped him bury the victims.’

‘A handful, in the end,’ Dr Chambers said.

‘What happened to them?’

‘Ballantyne wouldn’t have known he was the carrier. He was a hellfire preacher, not an epidemiologist. The survivors quit the island in haste and in a small boat and the boat foundered and their bodies were torn to pieces over time on the reef that surrounds all but the eastern approach to New Hope. They were food for the fishes, Ms Church.’

Lucy had to admit this was the most convincing explanation of events she had come across so far. She said so.

‘Thank you. I enjoyed your piece about the school. It was moving without being maudlin and very atmospheric. I could see their little stools with the embroidered cushions still on them. You can certainly write.’

‘Thank you.’

Lucy put down the phone with a higher opinion of Jane Chambers than she had possessed a few minutes earlier. And it was not just because of the compliment she had been paid. All of McIntyre’s team were of a high calibre, when she thought about it. It made her think the New Hope mystery might actually be in danger of being definitively solved.

She was about to start to write up her interview when her phone rang. When she picked it up, the switchboard asked her could Dr Chambers be put through. She said yes, of course.

‘There is one more thing you might wish to include in your piece,’ she said. ‘If I am right about this and it was an epidemic, the virus or bacillus is likely to be live. It’ll be present in the corpses, in their bone marrow or their teeth or the roots of their hair. It’ll be highly infectious and we might not have an antidote to it.’

‘Would that not deter you from going?’

‘I’m not a dilettante, Ms Church. Some people are prey to that misapprehension about me because I drive a sports car and wear good clothes and appear on their television screens from time to time. Fripperies aside, I’m first and foremost a scientist. The New Hope mystery has fascinated me since childhood. Nothing would deter me from going.’

On the morning of his first full day on New Hope, Napier decided that going for a run would be the best way to familiarise himself with the Island’s topography. He was in the habit of keeping fit. It would also get him away from the company of the Sea Sick Four and their conversation, most of which seemed to comprise accounts of the various confrontations they had enjoyed manning the doors of the nation’s nightclubs in their past lives.

Blake’s banter was of a slightly different order. He had endured some of that over breakfast.

‘Wouldn’t have had you down as a poof,’ Blake said.

‘Come again?’

‘Your partiality to folk music is a dead giveaway. The Barnsley Nightingale, isn’t that what you called her? Do you crochet as well?’

‘Of course I do. Doesn’t everyone? And my wallet is full of supermarket loyalty cards. And nothing gives me the satisfaction that bleeding radiators does.’

‘And you window shop at Homebase.’

‘No, I don’t,’ Napier said. ‘It’s too exciting for me, Homebase. Wouldn’t want to raise the blood pressure and put myself at risk of a stroke.’

‘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

‘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 non-existent 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 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.

Chapter Four

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. 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 New 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 New 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. 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.

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.

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 grey 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?’

‘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 that capped the building. 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 discernible 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?’

Cooper answered without turning around. He said, ‘I’ve never met your paper’s editor.’

‘Not Marsden. I’m talking about my ultimate boss. I mean Alexander McIntyre.’

‘No,’ Cooper said. Now he did turn around. He’d pried the tops off the bottles and they were beading at their necks in the grip of his twin fists with condensation. He was grinning. ‘I may have been in the same room as your proprietor, but I don’t believe I have ever spoken to him in my life.’

Lassiter left it until noon before calling Alice Lang. He considered himself a man curious by temperament. He did not think it was possible to be good at detection without possessing a strong degree of natural curiosity. So he wanted to call her, really, from the moment he awoke. But he decided to leave it out of consideration and tact until a time when she might have regained some sense of self possession.

She had blacked out. She had gripped the film can briefly in the fingers of her left hand and lifted its insubstantial alloy weight from the table and then her shoulders had sagged and her chin slumped onto her chest and he had in a snapshot of self-loathing been aware of what she would look like in middle-age.

He lifted her from the chair and placed her carefully on the floor. He put her into the recovery position and pinched her nose upwards and opened her mouth with gentle pressure to the sides of her jaw and was gratified, when he listened, to hear that she was breathing normally.

Her eyes started open. She saw him, kneeling on his thin carpet beside her. Her body juddered with remembered shock. ‘Hold me,’ she said.

And Patrick Lassiter held Alice Lang as he had not held a woman for a decade or more. He held her tenderly and he stroked her cheek and shushed whatever silent noises gave rise to the current turmoil in her gifted mind.

Now, on the phone, almost 19 hours later, he coughed to clear his throat and said, ‘Tell me, Alice. Tell me what it was you saw.’

She answered with a question. She said, ‘What do you know about the death of David Shanks?’

‘Not much,’ Lassiter said. ‘He died in County Clare in the West of Ireland. I don’t know the specifics. His body washed up on a remote beach, not far from the Cliffs of Moher. It was 42 years ago. He must have set out in his fishing boat and then foundered in a squall. The Atlantic is an unforgiving ocean, violent and cold. The weather off Clare is unpredictable. It was not one of those whiskey and fiddle-playing Irish deaths. It was bleak, no music or laughter. All that I think can be said for certain is that he died as he largely lived, alone.’

‘I know the specifics,’ Alice said. ‘You’re wrong in one important regard. Yesterday afternoon, I saw his death. He didn’t die alone, Patrick. Though I am fairly certain he would’ve wished he had.’

Napier waited by the makeshift harbour for the arrival of the choppers bringing the construction crew. They were a specialist outfit, experts at what they did. They would build the command centre from which the investigation into the New Hope vanishing would be organised and run. They would build the media centre from which the world would receive its carefully rationed revelations. They would build the accommodation in which the team of disparate experts would shelter and sleep when they weren’t on site.

Even before their arrival, Napier envied them. He possessed a set of job skills that made him a misfit in civilian life. They, by contrast, were knowledgeable and respected professionals. He hoped they would also be better company than Captain Bollocks and the Seasick Four.

At that moment, the former had deployed the latter on sentry duty, no doubt to impress the new arrivals with a show of vigilant authority. The captain himself was probably on the south of the Island in David Shanks’ crofter’s cottage. Strictly that was out of bounds, but the captain was the sort who enjoyed pulling rank and he spent more and more of his time there.

There was a window in the weather. It was not just mild, it was glorious. Generally you heard the heavy thrum of the choppers before they came into sight. That was particularly true of the Chinooks, with their twin rotors and the mighty turbines powering them. Today, though, he thought that he would see them before hearing the sound of their approach. Visibility seemed boundless, nature benign, the island positively Famous Five like in its picturesque appeal.

Despite this, Napier brooded. He brooded on his clay pipe find because the circumstances gave him no choice. He could not share the discovery with Blake. Captain Bollocks was the status conscious sort. Whatever his own private opinion about New Hope’s mysteries, the captain’s public attitude would be bound to be one of cynical disbelief.

With a bloke like Blake, incredulity was the default setting. He was the granite-hard combat veteran who believed in nothing he couldn’t poke with a bayonet blade; an insecure wanker desperate to prove a toughness he had never actually possessed. That was Napier’s considered opinion, who liked his commanding officer less with every strange occurrence this peaty northern paradise threw at him. Except that Blake wasn’t really his commanding officer, he was just the man in charge, the gaffer, whatever his military pretensions. And Napier had no respect for him or trust of his judgement at all.

The Seasick Four?

Do me a fucking favour, he thought. Napier reckoned he would tear out his own finger nails with his teeth before confiding anything that might come across as remotely inexplicable or spooky in any of them. It might amuse them. It might scare them. What it would most likely do would be to baffle them and alienate them even further from someone they already considered aloof and probably odd.

It left him entirely alone. Whatever was happening on New Hope, he would have no choice but to work out for his lonely old self.

Was he scared? Yes and no.

‘The nights,’ he muttered to himself. The days would likely be alright. The nights, however, he thought might prove to be altogether trickier.

Lucy asked Karl Cooper would he mind if she taped the interview. She’d decided a sort of exaggerated professionalism might be the best way to get her subject to drop his guard. He was a vain man. That was her instinct. He would relax into himself if made to feel important.

‘Have you always believed in alien life?’

‘Certainly I have for as long as I can remember.’

‘How did that belief originate?’

He smiled. He said, ‘to paraphrase a far more eminent scientist than I will ever be, I always thought that the universe to be not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.’

‘Haldane, the biologist,’ Lucy said.

‘Very good, you’ve done your research.’

‘So you assume the aliens are superior to us intellectually?’

‘That’s a given,’ Cooper said. ‘If they’ve been here, and I believe they have, then in order to get here, they have to possess technologies light years ahead of ours.’

‘Pun intended?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘So at a young age you decided that there was compelling evidence of alien life. And then you concluded that those aliens had visited earth?’

‘No. It was really the other way around. I looked, as a child, at the anomalies of history. The Aztecs constructed buildings of breathtaking intricacy yet an invention as fundamental as the wheel apparently never even occurred to them. Colossal sarsens hewn from a Welsh quarry somehow got to Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire to form Stonehenge; a structure of such geometric complexity we still debate its true purpose. Hauled there by Bronze Age man? Erected by Bronze Age man? I don’t think so. I could go on. But your readers have most of them heard me argue this stuff already on their television screens.’

‘Yet the general level of scepticism concerning alien life remains high.’

‘Does it? It might at the shabbier end of media, Lucy. It might in the halls of academe. It might among the scientific community, though that hasn’t been my personal experience. My peers don’t regard me as a laughing stock.’

‘I didn’t for a moment mean to imply they did, Professor Cooper.’

‘Karl, Lucy. Please. And anyway, I suspect the scepticism is a recent thing. You know about the ancient temple at Alexandria, about the library there?’

‘It was believed to contain the sum of human knowledge.’

Cooper nodded. ‘The answers to everything; the answers to questions no one had yet dreamed of asking and wouldn’t for centuries.’

‘It burned down. The knowledge was lost.’

‘And yet men with great minds through history believed it was there to be lost. That’s the crucial point. From Copernicus to Galileo, from Bacon to Newton, they believed. And they were rational men. And how would that knowledge have been accrued? Who would have compiled the information and assembled it there?’

‘A blueprint for civilisation, handed to us by benevolent visitors from another galaxy?’

Cooper smiled. ‘I could hardly have put it better myself,’ he said.

The ego stroking had been done. It was time to take a risk. Lucy drew in a breath. ‘Jane Chambers believes the New Hope settlement vanished because of plague.’

Cooper shrugged. His eyes betrayed nothing.

‘What do you think of that theory?’

‘I think that she’s entitled to it. I also strongly suspect that the forthcoming expedition findings will prove her spectacularly wrong.’

‘Have you discussed it with her?’

‘No.’

‘But you do know her?’

Cooper smiled a tight smile. He reached forward from where he sat to the low table between then and switched off the voice recorder. He said, ‘You mean do I know Jane Chambers in the biblical sense? The fact that you ask the question suggests you’re aware of the answer already.’

‘It’s something you don’t wish to talk about?’

‘It’s a subject I can’t talk about, Ms Church. It would be at best discourteous and at worst a betrayal. We had a brief relationship. It ended badly. What the tabloids subsequently printed was pretty much a web of lies it would’ve made things even worse to try to disentangle by telling the truth. All of that’s off the record, by the way. I can’t and won’t talk about this stuff, though I do respect the journalistic imperative that compelled you to ask.’

Was he being sarcastic? She really could not tell. She decided to ask him about his own theory about the New Hope Island disappearance. It was safe ground and of more interest to most of her readers than her subject’s patchy love life. She switched the machine back on. He smiled at her. She was reminded of what Jane Chambers had said, about her being fundamentally a seeker after truth, under the fripperies of her fast car and designer wardrobe. She wondered had the man she faced at that moment, the same basic integrity.

‘Why did aliens abduct the settlers of New Hope Island?’

Cooper didn’t answer her for a long time. Then he said, ‘Perhaps Jane’s right and they were afflicted with disease. And that disease was incurable with only the primitive medical resources available then to earth. Perhaps they were taken away to be cured. Salvation was their objective in the New Hope Island community. It’s possible the aliens saved them, but in a manner they hadn’t expected.’

‘You don’t for a minute believe that.’

‘No. I don’t. I think the community was healthy and structured and prosperous. They were pious and industrious and sane.’

‘Then why were they taken?’

‘I suspect because they could be, without witnesses, without undue repercussions or fuss.’

‘But to what purpose, Karl?’

‘I don’t know. I could float a couple of theories Lucy, but I honestly don’t know. It’s exactly what I’m going to the Hebrides to try to discover and I won’t rest once I get there until I’ve succeeded in doing so.’

It was Lucy’s turn to nod her head. He sounded a great deal more sincere outlining his expeditionary ambitions than he did mouthing platitudes about his jilted lover. I don’t like him, she thought, with a jolt of disillusionment. He’s dishonest and has far too much self regard. She thought that in person, she could conceal her dislike. But she thought it might be a more difficult thing altogether to hide in print.

Chapter Five

Jane Chambers drove the 60 miles to her daughter’s boarding school pretty much dreading the confrontation to come. There was no avoiding it, though. She was going to the Hebrides and that was that. Edith would have to stay with her father for the summer.

She wouldn’t like it, she might even claim to hate it, but as a single mother Jane had a living to earn and the research funding at the hospital grew more precarious with each round of NHS budget cuts. Virology wasn’t exempt from the economies being made in every department. Her public profile was important in helping to sustain her stature in medicine. The hospital liked the prestige the publicity brought with it.

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. She consigned it to a rubbish bin without further study. She knew all she ever wanted to know about Karl Cooper.

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.

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. 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.

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

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.

Then something changed. Lassiter never learned the specifics. 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.

All he knew was that the attitude of the people responsible for the museum’s archive suddenly shifted. They became cooperative where they had been obstructive and cordial where there had previously been only disdain. 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.

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, excitement 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 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 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.

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? 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.

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 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.’

‘I see.’

‘It’s a formality. Some of the objects we house are very valuable. Our insurers insist. A questionnaire was filled in by Mr McIntyre’s people on your behalf.’

‘Fair enough,’ Lassiter said. ‘What’s your point?’

‘You’ll probably scoff at what I have to say.’

‘Try me.’

Fortescue glanced across at his manifest, as though it might have fluttered off somewhere, or was about to. It lay where he had left it. ‘The sea chest belonging to Ballantyne came into our possession when the Maritime Museum was founded in the 1880s. Prior to that time, it was in the possession of the Browning family. Since that time, it has gained a reputation for bad luck.’

‘I thought that the contents had never been publicly displayed.’

‘They haven’t, they’ve been the subject of study on two occasions. The first was a few years after the conclusion of the Great War. A man called David Shanks asked to see the contents of the chest. He was a distinguished former soldier and something of a writer in the Orwell mode.’

‘Yes,’ Lassiter said. ‘I’ve heard of him.’

‘He stole something.’

‘He did what?’

‘The theft wasn’t discovered.’

‘Careless.’

Fortescue tried to smile. The smile was unsuccessful. He had become too pale to smile heartily. ‘Shanks returned the stolen object, by post, in the autumn of 1937. He wrote both an apology and a warning to others about the item he’d returned.’

‘Do you have the letter?’

‘No. It was lost, or destroyed. I suspect the latter. In it, I believe he blamed the thing he’d taken for a run of bad luck he said had blighted his life.’

‘Tell me about the second study of the contents of the chest.’

‘You might wonder why there’s not been more academic interest.’

‘Because it doesn’t help solve the mystery,’ Lassiter said. ‘The chest contents are a snapshot, presumably, of the life Ballantyne left behind. They were abandoned a good decade before whatever happened on New Hope Island to cause the community to vanish. They are not clues to anything except who Ballantyne was before he established his cult. I’m surprised there hasn’t been greater public interest, though, of the more prurient sort.’

‘These things go in cycles,’ Fortescue said. ‘We’ve always tried to discourage press interest in the existence of the chest.’ He nodded in the direction of the manifest, ‘That’s there, for anyone who wants chapter and verse. And of course the individual items have all been photographed. And anyone can request to see the photographs. Every decade or so, someone stirs some interest in the New Hope Enigma and we get a fresh spate of enquiries. We’re getting them now. The most recent came from a television production company shooting a documentary.’

‘A spoiler,’ Lassiter said, ‘A knee-jerk reaction to the McIntyre expedition.’

‘We said no to them, as we tend to do.’

‘Yet you said yes to me.’

Fortescue reached into his jacket pocket. He pulled out a pair of white cotton gloves. They were the type used to handle the contents of evidence bags and seeing them made Lassiter momentarily nostalgic for his old job.

‘We said yes to Mr McIntyre’s largess,’ Fortescue said. ‘Here. Put these on.’ He handed over the gloves and then produced a small iron key. ‘You’ll need this. I’ll explain to you where the chest is located.’

‘You won’t accompany me?’

‘You don’t need a chaperone, Mr Lassiter.’

‘You’re not afraid I’ll steal something?’

‘You have an honest face.’

Not afraid I’ll steal something, just frightened to death of the chest and its benighted contents, Lassiter thought. It was dereliction of duty and almost certainly an offence for which the Keeper of Artefacts would be disciplined, were he to report it to someone more senior at the museum.

But Lassiter would not do that. He thought Fortescue a courteous individual, as cooperative in the circumstances as his evident terror made him capable of being. ‘You were going to tell me about the second person to conduct an academic study.’

‘Elizabeth Burrows. She was a sociology graduate doing a PHD on the subject of the origins of feminism. She had a thing for Charlotte Corday. Her heroine was Mary Wollstonecraft?’

‘Neither name means anything to me.’

‘Wollstonecraft was a writer. You might have heard of her daughter, also Mary, who married the poet Shelley and wrote Frankenstein.’

‘I’m guessing Elizabeth Burrows was intrigued by the character of Rebecca Browning.’

‘She was. After the disappearance, Rebecca became the subject of local scorn, with a lot of ignorant people saying Seamus had fled to the Hebrides mostly to escape his scold of a bride. Liz Burrows thought that only the malicious gossip it was. She thought the contents of the chest might offer clues about the real nature of Rebecca’s marriage to Ballantyne.’

‘Did she learn anything?’

‘Hard to say. Her doctoral thesis was never completed. She hanged herself in her college room about six weeks after examining the contents of the chest.’

Lassiter nodded, he looked at the little iron key, between his gloved fingers.

‘You go through the door there and then straight through the door opposite,’ Fortescue said, pointing. Lassiter could not help but notice that the extended finger trembled slightly. ‘You’ll see a set of descending steps. Take them. When you reach the bottom, take a longish corridor immediately to your left. The room you want is the last along it. You’ll find it unlocked.’

The room was lined with furled banners and flags and pennants and there were spars and oars leant in its corners. It was illuminated, when he found the light switch, from overhead by a single feeble bulb in a canvas shade. A smell pervaded the room; a mixture of salt and varnished wood and brass polish and a hint of damp; the antique smell of the sea, he thought, thinking the room he was in as claustrophobic as an old ship’s cabin.

The chest bore Ballantyne’s initials, described in brass studs embedded into its lid. It contained a telescope and a sextant and several navigation charts inscribed on vellum and tied with faded ribbons which once must have been crimson. There was an abacus with a walnut frame and painted ivory balls. There was a heavy cloth boat cloak which Lassiter took out and unfolded with almost exaggerated care. He thought that if he tried it on, it might almost be a perfect fit. Ballantyne had been a tall man for the period, but Lassiter had known that already.

There was a dress sword and a pair of buckled shoes and a heavy set of polished stone beads and a bracelet made from drilled animal teeth with a fine sliver chain running through them. On closer inspection, Lassiter concluded with a shudder that the teeth, all incisors, were more than likely human. The third artefact from Africa was a carved ebony figure of the sort familiar in junk shops when Lassiter had been a boy growing up in North London. They had probably been faked. This one certainly wasn’t. He couldn’t decide whether the Deity depicted was male or female. The features of the carving had a look that was sexually ambivalent and almost sly.

The most valuable item in the trove was the one Lassiter concluded David Shanks had stolen and then years later returned. It was a Breguet pocket watch, a minute repeater finely crafted in silver and enamel. The hands were blued and the face of the watch had endured two centuries without crack or blemish. It was an exquisite timepiece.

He knew that they were the most reliable and accurate watches of their period, not robust by modern standards, but phenomenally exact because for purposes of navigation, they had to be. They were also very valuable to collectors. That would have been equally true in the lifetime of David Shanks. Ballantyne’s watch would have been eminently collectible even eighty years ago.

Except that Shanks could not have sold the Ballantyne Breguet at auction. Auction houses demanded provenance. He had not come by the watch legitimately. He had stolen it and so it had never actually been his to sell.

Lassiter frowned and looked at his own watch. He did so because the one which had belonged to Seamus Ballantyne was showing the correct time. Well, every stopped watch did that, as every schoolboy could probably still tell you. They showed the right time exactly twice every 24 hours. A moment later, when the minute hand stroked and he felt the movement purr with life inside its silver case, Lassiter almost dropped the living object cradled in his palm.

Mechanical life, he thought. The watch possessed only mechanical life. Someone had surreptitiously wound it and its two hundred year old innards were performing with robust health. But who had resurrected it? He thought the winding of the watch a joke too far for the frightened man who had directed him here. Perhaps Ballantyne’s chuckling old ghost had done it; Ballantyne, who grey and decaying would shuffle out of the shadows down there in a moment to retrieve his old boat cloak and so restore forgotten warmth to his dead flesh.

Lassiter put the objects carefully back into the chest. He did so alert to sound. He did so sweating and with hands that would not quite obey his mind in the way they fluttered, clumsily. The bracelet of teeth chattered like laughter when he put it back. The impression of being watched down there in the quiet depths of the building was so strong that he almost looked behind him, to where he sensed the scrutiny was coming from. But he didn’t. He ignored instead an instinct he knew only fear and not the fact of observation could have provoked.

The thing was, that the scrutiny he felt wasn’t merely curious. It wasn’t even particularly hostile. It felt more contemptuous than that. It seemed whoever studied him did so disdainful and almost amused. It made him feel frayed and naked, childlike and with a child’s trapped helplessness. He had the feeling of being toyed with.

It changed abruptly, this mood of whatever presence there secretly shared that ill-lit space with him. He felt a black shadow of spite and rage envelop and then clutch at him unwilling to let go. It was pure malevolence and it was engulfing.

Closing the trunk lid brought no relief. Locking it required an immense effort of will because his instinct, which police work had taught him to trust, insisted he should bolt for the door and safety without a moment’s further delay. Fuck dignity and decorum. So overwhelming did the danger seem to him by that point, he felt as though it oozed like a gleeful threat from between the flags and banners lining the basement walls.

He stopped feeling scrutinised, started once again to feel safe, only when he reached the vestibule. He saw that the shadows there had lengthened. Fortescue awaited him. There was a curious look on the keeper’s face.

‘How long was I gone?’

‘You were down there just under an hour, Mr Lassiter.’

‘Is it always like that?’

‘Did you get what you came for? Did you get your snapshot in time of Seamus Ballantyne?’

Lassiter said again, ‘Is it always like that?’

‘I can’t say. Not for certain. I only inventoried the contents of the chest the once. It was not an experience I’d choose to endure again.’

‘I didn’t steal anything,’ Lassiter said.

‘No one in their right mind would.’

‘You said the items from the chest have been photographed.’

‘That was done a long time ago, back in the 1950s. The pictures are black and white but very detailed. Whoever did the job was a skilled still-life photographer.’

‘Did he or she comment on the experience?’

‘I’ve no idea of who the photographer was. An agency was commissioned to carry out the assignment. Sygma, I believe.’

Lassiter nodded and peeled off the cotton gloves. They were slightly damp now to the touch. He turned and made to leave.

‘Spend tonight in company, if you can, Mr Lassiter,’ Fortescue said into his wake.

Gloom had descended when he left the museum. The sky had become overcast and the cobbles were greasy with rain. When he got out of the museum precincts, to where the traffic flowed, the dimmed headlamps of cars were streaks and daubs of light emerging and disappearing through grey air. The weather had been sunny for so long he had forgotten how gloomy the world could appear.

He very badly needed a drink. There was no waiting today for the healer. He needed it before nightfall.

He found a pub and bought a double scotch. The place was busy, nowhere to sit at the bar among the press of thirsty customers vying to be served. A football match, he thought, but then noticed how well-dressed the punters were, men and women both. Football matched weren’t played in England in June. A race meeting at Aintree, he thought, it was the height of the National Hunt season, wasn’t it?

The pub was late Victorian, engraved ornamental windows, heavy oak fixtures, a heaving saloon and a snug to the rear which looked a quieter refuge to a man seeking somewhere peaceful in which to sip a restorative drink.

All the tables but one in the snug were taken and the one was half taken, a woman seated at it with her head over a book and no glass in front of her. She didn’t look as though she was waiting for a companion to return from the bar or lavatory.

She had a self-contained air. She wore her hair in a precisely cut black bob and its geometric frame emphasised the paleness of her skin and the vivid red of the lipstick she wore. She was a strikingly attractive woman and she would probably suspect his motive in asking but he needed somewhere to sit. She’d soon realise her caution unnecessary. Fearful and distracted as he was, he was in no mood to chat anyone up.

‘Excuse me, Miss. Is this seat taken?’

She looked up at him from her book. She was stylishly attired in a black wool coat with twin rows of gilt buttons. Her eyes were a brown so dark that in the diminished light of the pub, they were almost black. She snapped the book shut in her hand. Her voice was only a hoarse whisper when she said, ‘You should leave this matter be, Mr Lassiter. No good can come of it.’

She stood and slipped out of the snug doorway in one swift movement and so disappeared from sight. For a moment he was too stunned to react. Then he followed her. The crowd in the saloon was a boisterous human obstacle to anyone trying to heave through it to the entrance. But she had gone. There was no sign of her at all.

He went back to the snug. She had left her book on the table top. In her hands, it had appeared new, a vivid matt orange jacket binding pristine pages within. But abandoned there, he saw that it was a battered old Penguin paperback, the classic livery, its cover sun blistered and lotion smeared from beach reading and its pages mottled by the passage of time. It was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

He had stumbled about three blocks with no clear destination in mind and the strengthening rain had drenched him by the time he found the mental composure to pause and fumble for his mobile in the shelter of the doorway of a derelict shop. He called the museum and asked for the Keeper of Artefacts.

‘I was about to turn it in for the day, Mr Lassiter. You’re lucky to catch me.’

‘I think I might have seen a ghost.’

There was a silence on the line. Then, ‘David Shanks?’

‘A woman, early 20s, immaculately groomed, pale complexioned and wearing her hair in a black bob. She was seated. When she stood, she was quite tall.’

‘She didn’t really look very much like a student, did she? She certainly didn’t have the look of a 70’s feminist. I don’t think she’d have been seen dead, frankly, in a boiler suit.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’ve just described Elizabeth Burrows.’

Lassiter swallowed, ‘Really?’

‘To the life,’ Fortescue said.

‘When did she kill herself?’

‘In the autumn of 1971.’

‘She knew my name,’ Lassiter said, forlornly. But there was no one to hear him say it. Fortescue had broken the connection.

Chapter Six

Blake watched the construction team unload their raw materials from the payload bays of the two Chinooks envious of the professionalism and urgency they showed. They had obviously been briefed on the volatility of the weather and construction was weather dependant. They wanted to get as much done as they could before there was any deterioration in the prevailing conditions that might hamper their efforts.

They loaded the trailer attached to the stubby little four-wheel drive vehicle rolled out of a chopper’s belly and they transported their sections of timber and titanium and Kevlar toughened fabric the 500 metres from the landing spot to the site of the experts’ camp.

Blake envied them their sense of purpose. They were half a dozen men literally doing something constructive. He led a team of five. They comprised the Seasick Four and the ex-sergeant-major Paul Napier, a war hero whose nerve had deserted him three years ago in Afghanistan.

He had some sympathy for Napier. He’d heard about the circumstances of the action which had robbed the SM of his nerve and didn’t think he knew of anyone sane who’d have emerged from the incident without trauma. But practically speaking, he was saddled with four overweight, clueless stiffs and a man still a victim of battle shock. And there was something about the island that made him think he’d need far more formidable back-up than McIntyre’s organisation had provided him with.

Quad bikes would have been a start, he thought to himself. The terrain was ideal for them. They would have raised the collective morale of his little force. Treat men with respect — give them the tools for the job — and their ability and willingness to do it increases exponentially. Aboard a quad bike, given that crucial extra mobility, he would by now, he thought, have identified the interloper he was pretty sure was lurking clandestinely on the island and had been since before his team’s arrival.

He wasn’t given to fanciful thinking. He had a trained mind and had done the courses and was schooled to reason in a focussed and disciplined way. He didn’t think some folk-singing phantom haunted New Hope in the way that poor, damaged Napier seemed to. But he had the strong feeling of being watched and over the course of his career had been in enough hostile places to suspect that the scrutiny wasn’t friendly.

Someone was there who wasn’t supposed to be. He’d have bet a month’s salary on that.

Blake would find that person. It was his duty to his employer to do so and professional pride would insist that he succeed in finding, confronting and exposing them. A weapon would be useful, he thought. Even a side-arm, a Sig-Sauer pistol or a bog standard Browning automatic would be both a comfort and a useful tool.

He’d begin his search in earnest once the construction guys had built the camp and departed. Their presence, their diversionary industry, was too loud and intrusive to allow him to stalk and nail the island’s trespasser.

He would not, could not involve the Seasick Four in the mission. They’d likely turn a pursuit into a pantomime. The real question was whether he would involve Napier. He hadn’t yet decided about that.

Blake grinned wryly to himself and remembered the singing Napier had imagined at dusk on their first evening there as they walked the perimeter together. Just as he was fostering a bit of camaraderie, the ex-paratrooper had gone all weird on him. Fuck it, he thought, with a quad bike pang. No wheels and no weapon, but the island is small and I’m pretty handy with a knife. The feeling of being watched was irritating, like an itch you couldn’t scratch. It was persistent and it bothered him.

You think you’re sly and clever but I’ll track and find you, you fucker, Blake thought. And when I catch you, you won’t fucking know what’s hit you.

McIntyre told Karl Cooper what Lassiter had told him about his Liverpool experience over dinner at his home. He said that he’d sent Lassiter to examine some items that had belonged to Seamus Ballantyne. He said that among those items had been a pocket watch. The watch, when recovered from a locked sea chest, was ticking strongly and showing the correct time. This was despite it having been stored there undisturbed for several years. Lassiter further claimed that the watch had spent better than a decade in the mid-twentieth century in the possession of the crofter David Shanks.

Cooper was recently familiar with the name of Shanks. McIntyre had shown him the film shot on New Hope Island in the 1930s. He hadn’t really said much about it at the time of the showing. He’d grown pale watching it. The footage didn’t make for comfortable viewing. His only comment at the time had been that he thought the film probably genuine. It was too disturbing to be faked.

The meal the two men had just shared had been genuinely convivial. McIntyre enjoyed Cooper’s company as well as his expertise and insights. In some ways he thought of Karl almost as a surrogate son, so close was the conviction they shared about the existence of intelligent life beyond earth’s boundaries. He felt affection as well as admiration for this young man, with his crystalline intellect and unforced charisma. Cooper had prospered despite a modest upbringing. It was an achievement they had in common.

He had uncorked a bottle of brandy, laid down when Napoleon Bonaparte still ruled France and its First Empire, before Cooper chose to comment. It was an extravagant gesture but one McIntyre felt his respect and fondness for his guest justified. Besides, they were on the brink of a historic discovery. He thought of the picture in his school history book of Napoleon in Egypt contemplating the secret of the Sphinx.

They were seated by now on the sun terrace of his house, enjoying the views out over London from the top of Highgate Hill and smoking McIntyre’s cigars as evening embraced the world.

‘And you’re concerned by what you’ve told me?’

‘I am, Karl. Very.’

‘Lassiter’s a drunk. That’s the impression you’ve given me of him.’

‘He’s an alcoholic. There’s a difference. I wouldn’t employ a drunk. He wouldn’t work under the influence. He’s too fastidious for that. And he’s exceptionally good at what he does. I believe the experience he endured in that museum in Liverpool to have been genuine.’

‘All experiences are subject to interpretation.’

‘I know that. I was happy to believe David Shanks brought his apparition with him to New Hope Island. I couldn’t see that black magic or paranormal phenomena of any kind had anything to do with the fate of the original community. I could think of only one plausible explanation for the vanishing.’

‘There is only one plausible explanation,’ Cooper said, reaching to tap ash from the tip of his cigar. ‘We both know that.’

‘Shanks dabbled in magic,’ McIntyre said. ‘At least, there’s compelling circumstantial evidence to suggest he did so and that he later lived to regret it.’

‘Thus the unwelcome subject of his home movie,’ Cooper said, ‘New Hope’s spectral little squatter.’

‘A 200 year old watch, apparently winding and setting itself in a locked chest in a museum basement is a separate matter, however, for which I can think of no explanation which offers any comfort at all.’

‘Swiss precision,’ Cooper said.

McIntyre smiled, despite himself. ‘Very droll,’ he said.

‘You have only Lassiter’s word, about the watch.’

‘Which I’ve just told you, I trust.’

‘He could have made the story up to make his work on your behalf seem more important than it really is.’

‘The experience scared him,’ McIntyre said. ‘He wasn’t trying to impress me in recounting it.’

‘Kinetic energy,’ Cooper said, after a pause. ‘There must have been a tremendous release of kinetic energy when the alien spacecraft landed and its occupants made contact. That could affect something as complex as a watch mechanism. It might generate power in the watch movement for centuries.’

‘Except that the watch never went to New Hope Island,’ McIntyre said. ‘It was left behind in Liverpool in the possession of Rebecca Browning. It’s not a relic of the New Hope community, Karl, but a souvenir of Ballantyne’s seafaring life. All of the stuff in the chest pre-dates the New Hope experience. None of it ever went near the island.’

Cooper was quiet for a moment smoking, contemplating, absorbing this information and its implications. He sipped from his glass. Then he said, ‘Shanks stole the watch, right?’

‘He stole something. The watch had far greater intrinsic value than anything else in the chest. Lassiter quite reasonably concluded it was the artefact stolen.’

‘So for more than a decade, that pocket watch was in the possession of a black magician. Its mechanical mischief, if Lassiter’s to be believed, is more likely than anything to be a consequence of that fact. Like that apparition he captured with his cine-camera, it’s to do with Shanks and his demonic dabbling and not the Island at all. It has nothing to do with the disappearance of the community. It has nothing even to do really with Seamus Ballantyne.’

‘Damn David Shanks,’ McIntyre said. ‘That man didn’t just try to settle on New Hope, Karl. He contaminated the place.’

‘We’re talking about a revenant apparition.’

‘And a delinquent timepiece,’ McIntyre said.

‘For which I keep reminding you, we only have Lassiter’s word. Keep things in proportion. It doesn’t amount to a curse. You have people on the Island, right?’

‘A small security team has been there for a week. An ex-Royal Marine captain by the name of Blake is in charge. One of the chaps with him was awarded the Military Cross during his third tour of duty with the Parachute Regiment in Afghanistan.’

‘Good men then, reliable, presumably vigilant, well-qualified. Have they reported anything out of the ordinary?’

‘They’ve reported nothing whatsoever.’

‘There you are.’

‘There’s a construction crew there too as of this morning,’ McIntyre said, ‘building the living quarters you and the others will occupy. I suppose if New Hope was afflicted by ghostly goings on, someone would have radioed in to comment on it or complain.’

‘But no one has.’

‘Not yet.’

‘There are no ghosts, Alex. There was never anything magical or paranormal there. Not in the time of the settlement. There was no mass suicide induced by mass hysteria. There was no fatal epidemic of disease and the people didn’t embark from the island aboard a fleet of boats for pastures new without leaving a note. They were taken. They were chosen and taken by benign and curious visitors to our world and when I get there I promise you I’ll uncover the proof of that.’

‘And you still believe they left a calling card?’

‘Somewhere on the island, I’m convinced they did,’ Cooper said. ‘And when I find that, you’ll have your world exclusive. And I’ll have my first solid step on the route to establishing formal contact. It’ll be a moment for the world to gather breath.’

‘It’ll put both our names in the history books.’

The two men were poised, about to clink glasses in a toast to that happy thought, when the phone at McIntyre’s elbow rang. He picked up the receiver and listened for a while and then grunted one unintelligible word and replaced it.

‘Trouble?’

‘That was Carrick, the paper’s features editor. One of our team of experts has rendered himself indisposed.’

‘Which?’

‘Simon Hawsley-Smith, the spiritual medium.’

‘No great loss,’ Cooper said.

‘We need to be seen to cover every eventuality, Karl. We need to be authoritative and scrupulous and professional. This is the definitive investigation into perhaps the greatest unsolved mystery of modern times.’

‘So long as you don’t lose our forensic archaeologist,’ Cooper said. ‘The ground there is going to yield some interesting secrets. He’ll be more than useful. He’s indispensable.’

‘Lassiter knows a psychic,’ McIntyre said.

‘You put too much store in Lassiter, Alex.’

‘She’s genuine, he says, highly gifted, if reluctant.’

‘If she’s genuine then it’s no surprise she’s reluctant,’ Cooper said. ‘A dialogue with the dead can’t be a comfortable encounter.’ He emptied the contents of his glass into his mouth and gulped appreciatively. ‘Think she can be persuaded?’

McIntyre shrugged. ‘Everyone has their price, is my experience. ‘

‘Me included?’

‘You’re the exception that proves the rule, Karl. I’ll call Lassiter in the morning,’ he said.

Lucy Church was getting ready for bed when the call came from Carrick. Features wasn’t hard news and personal disinclination prevented him from doing late nights habitually so she knew that something pretty serious must be up for him still to be working.

‘We’re an expert short,’ he said. ‘Our medium has just suffered a stroke that’s likely to prove fatal. That’s the prognosis, anyway.’

‘You’d have thought he’d have known,’ Lucy said.

‘Very bloody funny, not. He’s an expert in communicating with the other side, not a clairvoyant. He never claimed to be able to see the future.’

‘If he was destined to make it so soon to the other side himself, you’d have thought one of his contacts there would have told him how welcome he was shortly going to be. Wouldn’t you?’

‘Jesus, Lucy. You’re all heart.’

‘So the interview I had planned with him for tomorrow is off, then,’ Lucy said.

‘I should think that’s fairly bloody obvious,’ Carrick said. ‘Why else would I call you up so late at night?’

‘Well, James, I didn’t think it was because I was in trouble for that last piece. All the interesting observations I had to make about Karl Cooper were subbed out of what I wrote. I don’t honestly know why you made me bother. We could’ve just run one of the puff pieces his PR people generate. It would have saved my time and effort and been a great deal better for my journalistic credibility.’ She closed her eyes. A phrase such as that last one was a contradiction in terms to a man like Carrick and she well knew it.

‘You called him a narcissistic womaniser.’

‘I didn’t. I let him condemn himself. He’s boastful and supercilious. I don’t think I’ve met a vainer man.’

‘He’s also a personal friend of our proprietor.’

‘He denied that. So he’s a liar, too.’

‘Really took to him, didn’t you?’

Lucy didn’t reply. Carrick said, ‘If we’d printed the profile you wrote, you’d probably be out of a job. You certainly wouldn’t still be going on the New Hope Island expedition.’

‘Cooper would’ve thrown his toys out of the pram?’

‘Not Cooper, McIntyre. Bigger pram, ergo, bigger toys.’

‘They’re that close?’

‘They are. Like father and son. Don’t know what the common bond is, but something links them. Anyway, you should be thanking me. You’re still onboard.’

‘Any word yet on who’s coming with me?’

‘I am.’

‘You’re kidding, James.’

‘I wouldn’t joke about being dispatched to the Hebrides. Not when I’ve got tickets for the Lords Test and Clapton at the Albert Hall.’

‘When was the last time you actually wrote anything?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Carrick said. ‘The word has come from above. Ours is not to reason why.’

Or write the truth, Lucy thought. She could not remember the last piece she had read under James Carrick’s by-line. He was far more noted these days for sitting on the sofa as a regular guest on breakfast television, dishing out succulent morsels of celebrity gossip. She said, ‘Too early, I suppose, for a replacement medium to have been approached?’

‘Communing with the dead isn’t football, love. You don’t have an array of substitutes warming up on the touchline.’

‘It’ll be someone with a degree of notoriety, though,’ Lucy said.

‘Not necessarily,’ Carrick said. ‘We’ve already got the housewives’ choice in Karl Cooper. We have the only archaeologist in the country who could legitimately claim to be a household name. We have Doctor Eye-Candy, the hit series-fronting virologist.’

‘I was very impressed with Jane Chambers,’ Lucy said. ‘She sounded a damn sight more credible than Cooper, with his little green men.’

‘When are you doing the archaeologist?’

‘Day after tomorrow,’ Lucy said. He was actually a forensic archaeologist and his name was Jesse Kale and he was a burly, bearded Canadian who was a fixture on the History Channel. Lucy had rather gone off him after seeing him front an ad on telly for an absurdly macho brand of four-wheel drive. Then again, most television academics had their paws in any pot they could find. The public was fickle, fame precarious and life expectancy so long that everyone needed a pension plan. Jesse Kale was what, 38? He looked like the sort of bloke who might well live forever.

‘No rest for the wicked,’ Carrick said. He hung up. Lucy smiled wanly to herself. She was reminded of her own joke, taken by him as a compliment, that James had never knowingly entertained a thought that wasn’t a cliché.

Break a leg, she thought. She would try not to trip and do so climbing the stairs on her way to bed.

Jane put the song on again. In other circumstances, she thought that she would have been very taken with Kate Rusby’s singing. There was this poignancy to the way she interpreted a lyric and her voice had a tender, melancholic quality Jane didn’t think she had heard in any other singer’s delivery before. Maybe it was a folk thing, but she didn’t think so. It was a quality particular to the petite woman they called the Barnsley Nightingale. She was genuinely talented. The song, The Recruited Collier, was affecting and sad. Or it would have been, had Jane not become aware of it in so troubling a way.

She had met Edith in her dormitory and they had walked through the grounds because the day was so beautiful and the walk a part of the ritual they always indulged when Jane visited and it didn’t happen to be pouring with rain. Her first thought on properly seeing her daughter, once their embrace of greeting had broken, was of how well she looked. She seemed to have grown a bit and her eyes held a bright sparkle and her complexion glowed with health.

She could be cold with her mother. The break-up between her parents, the isolation it inflicted, had left her eventually with a capacity for objectivity most people only achieved in adulthood. School had further increased her independence. She was generally loving and open but never came across as needy, Jane supposed because she did not want to risk further disappointment.

‘I’ve just finished speaking to Mrs Sullivan.’

‘But she wasn’t the reason you came.’

‘No. She wasn’t.’

‘You came because of New Hope Island.’

They had been walking, arm in arm. Jane stopped and so Edith stopped too. She smiled at her mother and Jane realised with a shock that their eye level shared parity. They were now the same height. Her daughter would soon grow taller than she was.

‘I read the article in the paper, mum, that one written by Lucy Church?’

Jane opened her mouth to chastise Edith for up-speak, but thought better of doing so straight away. They all did it. ‘What did you think?’

‘I think you have to go. Come on, it’s not even a question. Everyone here’s buzzing with it already. The whole world will be watching and you’ll be there. How cool is that? I just wish I was coming with you.’

‘Not possible. It will mean you spending the summer with your father.’

They had resumed their stroll. Edith didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, ‘I’ve been kind of off with dad, haven’t I.’

‘I’ve known warmer nuclear winters,’ Jane said.

‘What’s a nuclear winter?’

‘Honestly. Do you know what it costs to send you here?’

‘Relax, mum. We did the Cuban Missile Crisis in history last term. When the world was nearly destroyed by atomic war?’

‘So you’ve been thinking about your father.’

‘I’ve been unkind to him.’

Jane didn’t say anything. She thought what Edith had actually been was indifferent to her dad, which was worse.

‘Mrs Sullivan is worried about these dreams, Edie. That’s what I talked to her about. And having spoken to her, I’m worried too. It’s a bit weird, to say the least. Tell me about them.’

‘He says it’s a song a woman should sing. He sings it, but that’s the reason he says he taught it to me.’

‘Who did?’

‘His name is Jacob Parr. He’s from the olden days. He smokes a clay pipe and his teeth are totally gross. He’s kind and patient though.’

‘You know the song. You can even play it. Why are you still dreaming about him?’

‘He says he has important things to tell me but the time isn’t yet right. I think the song was a sort of test.’

‘Testing what?’

‘That he’s not dealing with a total moron, when the time comes to tell me the important stuff.’

‘Are you afraid of Jacob Parr?’

‘No.’

‘How friendly is friendly?’

‘He doesn’t come on to me, mum. They’re not those types of dreams.’

‘They still sound a bit sinister.’

‘They’re not. He’s Jacob Parr. He’s just a guy from the olden days. He’s not exactly Freddy Krueger or Jigsaw.’

‘How do you know about Freddy Krueger?’

‘Some of the girls on the dorm are totally into horror.’

‘Who’s Jigsaw?’

‘You don’t even want to know.’

‘Do you watch horror DVD’s?’

‘No. I’m not into any of that stuff. Really I’m not.’

‘Promise me this, Edie. You’ll tell your father about the dreams?’

‘There isn’t much to tell.’

‘Promise me anyway.’

‘Okay.’ She smiled. ‘I love you, mum.’

‘And I love you, Edie Chambers. With all my heart, I do.’

Now, as bedtime approached, Jane listened to Kate Rusby sing the closing couplet of the song and pondered on what she had discovered about Jacob Parr.

Parr was a common enough English surname and Jacob was a once popular Christian name again enjoying a vogue among middle-class English parents. The Recruited Collier had been a popular song at around the time of the establishment of the New Hope Island settlement. So Jane, who had a scientist’s intolerance when it came to belief in coincidence, began to look for a Jacob Parr with a New Hope Island connection.

And eventually she found her connection. A man named Jacob Parr had been among the crew aboard Ballantyne’s slave vessel, the Andromeda. He had been a second mate and he had been twice flogged for drunkenness and eventually dismissed the ship’s company. After that, he disappeared from recorded history. He was certainly not among the men, women and children who founded the Island settlement in the Hebrides in the years following his dismissal. Probably he drank himself into the grave. Perhaps he sang well enough to earn coppers for doing so in the taverns where he drank.

Jane did not really believe in ghosts. But someone had taught her daughter that song in a recurring dream she had. She had said his name was Jacob Parr. And her daughter insisted that the man had important information he would pass on to her as soon as the time was right.

She didn’t think that the dreams put Edith in any danger. Jane couldn’t remember having seen her daughter in a happier or more relaxed frame of mind. But she did think that Parr’s intervention made her own impending trip seem somehow much more ominous than it had seemed prior to her visit to the school.

She wouldn’t discuss the dreams with her ex-husband. Edith had promised to do that herself when the time came, so she had no need. She wanted to tell somebody, however. She needed to. And though it seemed ridiculous to confide in a journalist, she thought that the person she most wanted to discuss this strange development with was that sympathetic features writer from their expedition sponsoring paper, Lucy Church. She thought that her daughter had rightly judged that Lucy liked her. She needed to confide in someone who would not simply laugh in her face.

Chapter Seven

Lassiter arrived at Alice Lang’s house at lunchtime the following day. He was surprised, really, that she’d agreed to see him with so little apparent reluctance. The David Shanks business had been an ordeal for her. Her attitude towards her gift was a complex one. She chastised herself for the things it made her feel. She interpreted the physical symptoms as weaknesses. If anything, Lassiter saw her willingness to endure them as proof of enormous strength. He had never liked nor admired a woman more.

They ate their lunch in the sunshine on her patio, amid spring blooms tended to by industrious bees, with Ellie Goulding playing from inside the open door on her iPod dock. Lassiter told Alice about his trip to Liverpool, about his elliptical conversation with the museum’s Keeper of Artefacts, about Ballantyne’s watch. Then he told her what he’d not told McIntyre, about the warning in the pub given him by a woman he was convinced was the ghost of Elizabeth Burrows.

‘She knew my name. And her warning to me was unequivocal.’

‘Are you not frightened by any of this?’

‘Of course I am. But I’m also intrigued. I’d like to discover what happened to the New Hope community, or at least play my part in finding out. If a crime was committed, it ought to be uncovered and solved.’

‘A diabolical crime,’ Alice said, ‘if it was a crime.’

‘An atrocity,’ Lassiter said, ‘on that scale. But the truth should out. The victims deserve it. The perpetrator deserves to be exposed.’

‘A policeman’s instinct.’

He shrugged. ‘It’s a while since I’ve had the right to call myself a policeman.’

‘Do you have any theories?’

‘Not really. I tend to avoid theories until I’ve visited the crime scene and I won’t be going on the expedition. I do think Seamus Ballantyne himself is the key to it, though. And I think there’s much more to find out about him and his life and character somewhere. McIntyre’s right about that.’

‘And you’d still look, after the experience with the chest? After the warning you were given in Liverpool?’

‘Yes. I would.’ He smiled. ‘Less like an investigator really, than like a dog with a bone.’

‘Why are you here?’

He looked down at the table, to where his hands rested before his now empty plate. ‘I’m here on McIntyre’s behalf. Simon Hawsley-Smith has suffered a massive stroke. The expedition is a spiritual medium under-strength. McIntyre wants to know if you’d consider taking Hawsley-Smith’s place. McIntyre knows about my work with you. He appears to trust my judgement. I told him I didn’t think you’d for one moment seriously consider doing it, but I did promise I’d ask.’

Alice was silent for a moment then she said, ‘I’ll go if you go.’

‘What did you say?’

She rose to her feet. She smoothed the wrinkles from the sundress she had on with her hands. ‘Stand up,’ she said.

Lassiter stood.

‘Now kiss me.’

He kissed her. He had not kissed a woman properly for a long time. He cupped her shoulders between his hands. He could feel her lips firm on his and the sun warm on his back. Her hair smelled of scented shampoo from her morning shower. She tasted wonderful.

‘There,’ she said when the kiss broke. ‘Was that so difficult?’

‘No,’ he said, truthfully. ‘No, Alice. It wasn’t difficult at all.’

The communications expert accompanying the construction team sent to build the expedition base was a man named Charlie Brennan. Blake didn’t think that he looked very much like a radio geek. He looked like someone who did fell running or maybe canoeing in his spare time. He was fit and sinewy and had an athlete’s alertness. The weather was closing in by the time he sought out Blake, shortly before dusk.

Blake was in the cottage that had once belonged to David Shanks at the western extremity of the Island. It was becoming his habit to go there for a bit of seclusion, a respite from the lumpen presence of the Seasick Four. In the field, routine was deadly because it led to ambush and the best way to safeguard your life was to vary your schedule so that your movements could not be accurately predicted. He was not in the field now, however. New Hope Island was not a combat zone. The trespasser whose presence he had sensed was not an assassin or even an enemy, strictly speaking.

So he sheltered in the cottage whenever he could, where the views out over the sea were the most spectacular on the Island and where the holed roof allowed at least some protection from the rain and the sturdy whitewashed walls formed an efficient windbreak.

Privacy was a strong part of the appeal of the cottage. There, he was out of sight of the Seasick Four and Napier. He thought there should be something kept apart in the character of any commander. You lost authority if the men under your leadership knew too much about you. You had to retain your capacity to surprise them to keep them on their toes. It was Blake’s belief that there was something enigmatic about all the best military leaders. He had never taken part in the game, but he thought that if he did, he’d likely prove to be an excellent poker player.

Brennan knocked on the canted door of the cottage just as Blake was swallowing the last of a brew of sweet tea concocted over his Primus stove. He was seated in an oak rocking chair, one of the few pieces of Shanks’ furniture that had not surrendered to the salt and damp of the Island atmosphere and simply rotted away. Brennan did not salute, but there was a formality about his body language as he stood in the doorway that Blake appreciated. It signalled respect. He stood and snapped off a salute of his own, thinking old habits and all that. It did no harm and it felt good.

‘Captain Blake, right?’

‘At your service,’ Blake said.

Brennan had to raise his voice against the howl of the wind and the crash of the surf on the darkening shore to his rear. He wore a poncho and the waterproof fabric snapped wetly in the strength of the gusts, rippling against his torso and arms. ‘I need to speak with you, Captain,’ he said. ‘Would you come back with me now?’

‘Sure.’

Blake followed him. The ground was a wet, uneven slog underfoot. Slippery tussocks of grass concealed boggy patches that would swallow a leg to the kneecap with a sudden plunge. Blake and his team had found it easier to travel the perimeter of the island, where the shingle at the edge of the water thinned and packed sand proved a more certain surface to walk on. But in severe weather the size and strength of the waves made that too hazardous and after nightfall, it was suicidal. And this weather was severe. And it was worsening.

They walked in silence. The wind, as the ground rose at the island’s centre, was a banshee howl that made speech impossible. But Brennan was as fit as he looked and as Blake routinely kept himself in shape their progress was steady enough. The construction crew had built the camp with impressive speed. It comprised a cluster of one-storey rectangular buildings, each with a rigid outer shell and as he saw when he entered one, an inner lining of some insulating material that retained warmth and deadened exterior sound. He assumed that the frames were built from some high-tensile metal such as titanium. As shelters they were state of the art. He could feel the thrum of a nearby generator providing the camp with electric light.

The communication centre had a table arrayed the length of one wall, bristling with a variety of receivers, speakers and microphones. Bunched cables were cuffed neatly with nylon ties. Needles wobbled across power metres ranged across displays. The consoles, with their complex arrangements of switches and buttons and dials, seemed like very high-end items of apparatus to Blake.

He knew he was looking at hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of gear. When the experts made their definitive findings and this story broke, communications failure was clearly not intended to be a factor in delaying the moment reaching the ears of an inquisitive world.

There was a third person in the hut. He was Troy, the leader of the construction crew, a stocky man with a heavy moustache and someone, to Blake, always characterised by a burly sort of self-confidence. Troy was the can-do type who led by determined and sometimes stubborn example.

Brennan invited Blake to sit in a chair next to that occupied by Troy, facing the comms hardware, where Brennan now sat on a stool pulled up to the table on which all the gear was mounted. Blake nodded a greeting to Troy. To Blake, Brennan said, ‘What kind of call-in system are you guys operating?’

‘We have a VHS two-way in the command tent. There’s no strict call-in time and there’s been nothing so far to call in. McIntyre’s people told us you were coming and then we got a call to say you were on your way. Obviously I check the signal strength each day, and it’s pretty variable. But we haven’t needed to use the rig in anger and I don’t expect that we will.’

Brennan nodded slowly after Blake had finished speaking. He looked at Troy. Then to Blake he said, ‘How do you guys communicate on patrol?’

‘Short-waves,’ Blake said. ‘We use walkie-talkies. They’re a bit sensitive to atmospherics, obviously. But cellular phones are completely useless here. Why are you asking me this stuff?’

Troy answered him. He said, ‘We’re supposed to rely on a hi-spec digital system. It’s a very fancy set-up technologically and on paper, has bags of transmission power. But it seems to be completely fucking useless. We’re dependant for signal strength on a mast outside Inverness. I’m talking third-gen DAB here, but all we’re getting is silence.’

It wasn’t Blake’s field. But he wasn’t totally clueless on the subject. He said, ‘Can’t you get on the FM spectrum? There are millions of tons of shipping in these waters completely reliant on it. You must have some analogue backup, surely?’

‘We do,’ Brennan said. ‘We’ve got quite a strong analogue signal, in theory. But there’s some sort of interference on the waveband. Listen to this.’

He reached over and flicked a switch and a power light glowed green on one of the consoles. Then he twisted a tuning dial delicately as the three of them strained to hear anything except screeches of static. In the relative quiet, Blake had time to appreciate again just how good the build quality of the command centre was. It was in sad contrast with his own Alpine frame tent. That had collapsed twice on him now, in the ferocity of the gale ripping through the Island in the small hours.

He heard something clarify on the analogue set. A sound he could make sense of was emerging from the speaker. It caused him to shake his head and suppress a shudder he didn’t want the other two to see. The sound was an ordeal to listen to and he was grateful after about a minute when Brennan flicked the switch that killed the power and abruptly cut it off.

‘What is that?’ Brennan asked.

‘You’re the expert.’

‘I’m asking you.’

‘They call it squelch, don’t they?’ Blake said. ‘It’s signal echo or localised feedback or rogue interference or something.’

‘What do you think it sounds like?’ Troy said.

Blake shrugged. ‘Like radio distortion.’

‘It sounds human to me,’ Brennan said. ‘I know it can’t be. But that’s what it sounds like. It’s fucking unbearable. It sounds like a child, screaming.’

‘I have to apologise for my colleague,’ Troy said to Blake. ‘It’s this place, if I’m honest. We’re used to catastrophe and rapid deployment and a shitload of corruption meaning bribes to pay if we ever want to get anything built in time to save lives in the locations to which we’re usually sent. My lads are not used to creepy. Not when creepy seems to be intrinsic to the place.’

‘You think the island a sinister location?’

‘It has a pretty sinister history,’ Brennan said.

Troy said, ‘It’s the outdoor equivalent of things that go bump in the night, if you get my drift, Captain Blake. I’ve had the feeling of being watched since I’ve been here. Not at night, because I’m asleep at night, so much as in the daytime. Three or four of my boys have commented on it. And these are guys who’ve worked in some pretty hostile environments, all over the world.’

‘The bogeyman is not going to get you, Mr Troy,’ Blake said. ‘My guys are here to prevent that kind of shit from ever occurring.’

He had decided to butch it out. These people were not his friends. If anything, he felt about them only their innate sense of superiority over him. They were specifically tasked and trusted with about half a million quid’s worth of hi-tech hardware. They’d arrived aboard a brace of Chinooks, not some bilge filled tub of a fishing charter. They’d built a command centre and accommodation units that were substantial and comfortable. He was a has-been heading up a team of five washed-up losers. He was occupying a tent you could probably buy on offer in any high street branch of Millets.

He had his dignity, though. He would not buy verbally into their suspicions about the island. He shared their misgivings. Sinister was New Hope’s default mode, in the language used by these people. They knew it and so did he.

But to confide that fact would be to betray weakness and undermine his position as the guy tasked to maintain the territorial integrity of the rock they happened currently to be calling home. At Troy’s invitation, he cracked a comradely beer with them. Then he bade them goodnight and wandered back into the shit-storm of Hebridean weather beyond their base.

He walked through the gale. The driven rain needled into his face, under the hood of his storm jacket. His progress was steady. He was comfortable with the terrain. His thoughts were on how well it would play with McIntyre’s people when he nailed the island’s intruder. It would play pretty well with McIntyre too, wouldn’t it? It might just be the achievement needed to secure a permanent place on Alexander McIntyre’s staff.

He had arrived at his destination. He looked up, slightly surprised at where he found himself, in front of the cottage built from stone by the crofter David Shanks in the first half of the previous century. He had walked back to the southern tip of the island when his actual destination was the ragged little camp they had built on their arrival in the shelter of a rise behind the island’s makeshift harbour.

How had he fetched up here? He nodded to himself. He thought it was probably because of an affinity with Shanks, the war hero and loner, the traveller and intellectual who had tried to make this place his home.

Blake stood there in the rain, in the lee of the cottage, listening to the waves hitting the shingle on the beach beyond, their somnolent pounding a rhythm he thought would probably lull a man into restful sleep till morning.

He took a deep breath, thinking once more about the happy parallels between himself and Shanks. They shared the same defining characteristics of modesty and ruthlessness. They were similarly tough and self-reliant and essentially private men.

And then he heard something from within the cottage itself. It sounded like a snicker of secret laughter. He froze and the hairs bristled on his forearms and the back of his neck and he strained, listening intently. He was only a foot from the door, which stood slightly ajar. But it still masked the cottage interior from the scant ambient light there in the night at the edge of the sea.

He heard another noise. He swallowed. This one was unmistakeable because he recognised it. It had become familiar to him. He had made it so himself, during his cottage interludes. It was the creak Shanks’s old rocking chair groaned out when its occupant tilted it back and forth.

Was the wind propelling the chair? Blake didn’t think so. He was certain when he heard that snicker of suppressed mirth again from the cottage interior, sly and gleeful. And then there was the familiar wooden sigh of the weight of someone rising from the chair within, to stand.

He wished he were armed. The knurled stock of a 12mil Sig-Sauer automatic; its cold and solid weight in the grip of his right hand; he would have given anything at that moment for that reassurance. But he didn’t have a pistol. He didn’t even have a knife. He stepped forward and pushed open the cottage door. He didn’t have a choice. He was the man responsible for the Island’s security and he was not a coward and had never run from anyone in his entire life.

It was a little girl. She looked waiflike, standing there, with a shawl around her scrawny shoulders, wrapped in the embrace of her own thin arms. She was smiling at him and her eyes glimmered blackly. There was some weird trickery of light and shade going on in the cottage that made it look to Blake like the little girl’s feet did not quite rest on the flagged stone floor. They looked a good few inches above it, as though she floated or hung there. The top half of her seemed to drift back and forth, almost as if in the play of the wind, but the cottage walls stilled the air within, so that was impossible. Wasn’t it?

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ Blake said. His throat was dry and he felt in the grip of something between despondency and dread. It delivered a sort of paralysis. He could not properly move. He could not even blink.

‘I like company,’ the little girl said, the voice gravelly and dragged out of her, like something only half-remembered from a long time ago.

Chapter Eight

Napier slept with a bayonet under his pillow. Old habits died hard and he had done it whenever he kipped outdoors since an attempt to kill him as he slept in Bosnia 15 years earlier. He’d awoken then because he couldn’t breathe, to discover a man straddling his chest and making a fairly good job of garrotting him. He still remembered how hard it had been to wrestle his way out of that predicament; to overpower and kill a strong and determined enemy in the confinement of a one-man tent with no weapon to hand.

His abiding memory of the incident was of the reek of Diesel coming off the man’s clothes once he was safely dead and Napier was able to breathe properly again. His attempted killer was one of the warlord Arkan’s bandit assassins and had spilled the fuel on his jeans siphoning it from one of the British military vehicles into a jerry can earlier in the day.

He’d been a thief as well as a murderer and Napier had felt no compunction at all about killing him. He just remembered afterwards the stink of Diesel and how long it took to accomplish a death inflicted with your hands alone. Thus the bayonet, whenever he slept under canvas, from that unpleasant evening on. He sharpened its edges on a whetting stone with the same unthinking regularity that he brushed his teeth before bed.

When he was rudely awoken on the island, he very nearly claimed another life. He had gripped the collar of the figure looming above him with the fingers of his left hand and held the bayonet in his right, about to draw it across the man’s throat. But in the glow from a dropped flashlight, he recognised the face of Malone, the least clueless of the Seasick Four, and stopped himself before the cut was made and Malone’s life bled away in an arterial eruption of gore.

It was some moments before Malone was capable of speech. The pause while he recovered from the shock enabled Napier to get dressed. Malone hadn’t woken him for nothing. This was far from a routine event, whatever it signified. He laced on his boots and exited his tent aware of the percussive drumming of rain on taut canvas and the howl of the wind as it scoured their rag-tag camp.

Malone stood, shivering.

‘Get over it,’ Napier said. ‘You’re not dead. You’d know if you were. What’s up?’

‘I heard a scream,’ Malone said. ‘I was patrolling the perimeter and I heard it over on the West shore, near the ruined cottage. I was heading for the cottage, for a break and a fag. And I heard a scream.’

Breaks and fags were very much what you had when you weren’t patrolling. Whatever Malone had heard had scared him into honesty. Napier was still sceptical, though. He said, ‘Could have been a gull or a seal. Could even have been a whale, in these waters.’

‘It was human and it was terrified,’ Malone said. ‘And when I looked there was no one around to do the screaming. And when I went to report it to Captain Blake just now, his sleeping bag was empty and cold.’

It wasn’t just blowing a gale. It was pissing down with rain. Malone’s pal Jarvis was somewhere to the north of where they stood, still patrolling. The rump of the Seasick Four, Smith and Cartwright, were fast asleep in their tents.

‘Who else knows?’

‘Nobody knows. I tried radioing Jarve for backup, but couldn’t get a signal. I came to tell Blake and he was gone. Then you nearly killed me.’

‘Stay here,’ Napier said. ‘Wake the others.’ He handed Malone his bayonet. ‘Sit tight. If anyone you don’t know approaches, if you’re attacked, use that. Do it. Don’t hesitate.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’ll wake up Troy and his team. They need to be warned and we need their help in searching for Blake.’

‘What do you think it is? What made Blake scream? Where is he?’

‘What do you think I am, Malone, the oracle of all fucking knowledge?’

‘I know who you are. We all do. I read about you in the paper after the thing in Afghanistan.’

‘Get Cartwright and Smith on their feet. Stick close and stay put. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

Alert to movement and sound, covering the distance to the project command centre, Napier refused to speculate in his own mind about what it was that was going on. He had no way of knowing. He didn’t think a clay pipe smoking phantom could have crooned Blake into a state of terror with an old folk song and he only had Malone’s word for it that the scream had been human.

Blake could have fallen badly somewhere or blundered into a bog or been swept out to sea by a freak wave. They were in a pretty elemental part of the world, all told. Speculation was pointless without some lead or clue. Waking Troy and his men was the imperative; doing that and then proceeding coolly and methodically.

Troy, once roused, fetched Brennan. The two of them told Napier about their earlier encounter with Blake. They told him Blake had drunk just the one can of lager prior to leaving them, sober and in good spirits, slightly preoccupied perhaps, but only with what his duties necessitated there on the island, if Troy was any judge.

‘Do you have any weapons?’

Troy and Brennan exchanged a look.

‘Level with me, boys.’

‘A couple of hunting rifles,’ Troy said, ‘bolt-action, small-bore, not exactly private army specification.’

‘Scopes?’

‘Night scopes on both,’ he said.

‘Good. Load both of them and give one to your lads here. Tell them to be vigilant. We’ll take the other one.’

‘Where are we going?’ Troy said.

‘We’re going back for Malone. Then you and me and Malone and Brennan here are going to go and take a look at that crofter’s cottage on the other side of the island. Then if necessary, we’re going to come back here and Brennan is going to establish radio contact with McIntyre’s people and we’re going to call this in.’

Brennan and Troy just stared at him and nodded.

‘Anyone have a problem with my taking charge over this?’

‘No,’ they said, together.

Lucy met Jane Chambers after her testosterone soaked encounter with the archaeologist Jesse Kale. Kale insisted on meeting her at the city boy boxing gym in Holborn he habitually used. He sipped at a high protein shake and teased the protective wraps from his hands and sweat smouldered off him photogenically. It was all a bit tragic, really, Lucy thought, since she hadn’t been accompanied as she might have in the old Fleet Street days by a photographer.

Kale was polite enough but not really engaging. Like most celebrity academics, he clearly felt as secured in his own myth as his hands were in the lint bandages protecting them from bruising harm when he threw his punches at the heavy bag. She couldn’t get past the wrapping to the flesh.

She thought Jane Chambers would be a relief. Not light relief, because she was an intellectually astute woman and hardly a lightweight as a personality. Her enthusiasms extended well beyond girly pastimes like gossip and shopping. But she had not been interested in emphasising her own credentials on the phone during their first conversation. She had been concerned only to try to provide a plausible scientific answer to the mystery of New Hope Island.

She had arranged to meet the virologist at a small restaurant with tables on the pavement in Lamb’s Conduit Street. It was conveniently near the hospital building housing Jane’s department. It was somewhere Lucy would be very unlikely to be seen by anyone connected to the paper.

Lucy got to the restaurant deliberately early. She found a table outside and ordered a small glass of Chablis and fired up an American Spirit. She inhaled the smoke gratefully, luxuriating in the guilt-free ten minutes she had to indulge her habit before Jane was due to meet her there.

The tables were Formica topped in a deliberately retro nod towards the continental style of the 1960s. The ashtrays were crimped little circles of metal foil. She was able to discard hers, along with the two butts it by then contained, in a street bin prior to Jane’s arrival. Her lunch companion was a medical doctor and Lucy liked to be approved of. It was a character weakness, she knew. But at least, she thought, seeing Jane approach along the pavement, svelte in a blue cashmere suit and sunglasses, I’m aware of it.

They were at the coffee stage before Jane finally confided what she’d come there to tell Lucy. Up until that point they spoke about the expedition generally and about Lucy’s earlier interview with the forensic archaeologist.

‘Does he have a theory of his own?’

‘He says he has an open mind. He says if your epidemic theory is correct, he’s confident he’ll find the mass grave. Kale actually thinks the explanation for the disappearance might be really mundane and so he’s checking meteorological data from the years immediately prior to the event.’

‘Why?’

‘He says because of the Island’s exposure to Atlantic storms. He believes that if the storms were particularly severe for a number of consecutive years, the Island community might have built a shelter underground to protect themselves from the worst ravages of the weather.’

‘And the shelter subsided or collapsed,’ Jane said. ‘And all the people sheltering were crushed or suffocated and perished.’

‘Pretty much.’

Jane smiled down at her plate. Her sunglasses were perched in her hair and there was a persistent frown line creasing her forehead. She looked pretty and troubled. She said, ‘Mundane enough, if a bit gruesome for the victims. But I don’t buy it.’

‘Neither does Kale, really. What’s bothering you, Jane?’

And Jane told her about Edith’s dreams and the song she had learned to play and sing in her sleep and about who Jacob Parr had been.

‘There must have been lots of men about then called Jacob Parr.’

‘It has to be Ballantyne’s Parr, otherwise it makes no sense at all. It can’t just be arbitrary. The chronology is right, Lucy. The song is of the period of the New Hope settlement. There has to be a connection.’

‘What do you intend to do about it?’

‘I don’t know, Lucy. I don’t even know why I’m telling you about it, really.’

‘A problem shared,’ Lucy said, with a bright cheer to her tone she didn’t really feel. What she really felt was slightly hollow and a bit numb.

Jane said, ‘I’d pull out of the New Hope project immediately if I thought for one moment Edith was in any physical or psychological danger. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.’

‘I’m not a mother,’ Lucy said. ‘This isn’t really my area of expertise. But maybe you should do that anyway.’

‘And risk antagonising Jacob Parr?’

‘You trust your daughter?’

‘I do, totally.’

‘Then I think you have to wait,’ Lucy said. ‘I think you have to wait until Parr gives Edith this warning he’s spoken of and Edith passes on the warning to you.’

Jane nodded. Lucy thought that she looked grateful and a bit relieved.

Jane wanted to split the bill, but Lucy put it on her expenses. All the way back, she thought about Jane Chambers’ curious confession. She didn’t have the slightest idea, really, of what to make of it. She had been fascinated by the New Hope enigma since devouring that Readers Digest article in her own childhood. She had never thought there to be anything genuinely supernatural about it. But she had a feeling, after her lunch with Jane, that the psychic chosen for the trip to the Hebrides might be in for a very interesting experience.

Lassiter looked different, to McIntyre. There was something new and unexpected about the body-language. The ex-detective usually had an air about him McIntyre would have described as apologetic; as though he was embarrassed about the space he took up and did not really feel his presence anywhere fully justified. There was usually something not just deferential but almost cap-in-hand about him.

But that air was conspicuous by its absence today. He looked smart and alert and full of confidence. This might have irked the newspaper magnate in another mood. But having heard what he had that morning, this afternoon he was actually reassured by his visitor’s demeanour. Lassiter did not know it yet, but McIntyre had plans for him.

‘Thanks for coming here at such short notice.’

‘You pay me pretty generously for my time.’

‘Not just for your time. Your talents are what I really pay you for. Did you put my proposal to Alice Lang?’

‘You could’ve asked me that over the phone, Mr McIntyre.’

‘I could have. But I asked you to come here in person.’

‘Which is intriguing,’ Lassiter said, ‘because I’ve always felt that you’ve deliberately kept me at arm’s length. You’ve always treated me a bit as though I might be carrying something contagious.’

‘When was the last time you had a drink?’

‘Three days ago. I ordered a large scotch in a pub in Liverpool.’

‘You remember the occasion?’

‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget it, Mr McIntyre. I didn’t drink the whisky, by the way.’

‘You saw the light?’

‘I saw something.’

They were on McIntyre’s sun terrace. McIntyre’s housekeeper had brought Lassiter there after opening the front door to him. So far, he had not been invited to sit. McIntyre sat in an armchair facing the view down the hill towards London. It was one of a pair titled in that direction. It was late afternoon and smog glazed the city and made its landmarks ripple slightly so that it made a person wince to stare at them too hard.

‘Alice says that she’ll do it, but she has a pre-condition.’

‘I’ll pay her generously.’

‘Money isn’t what’s on her mind.’

‘Sit down,’ McIntyre said. He gestured at the chair next to his own. ‘Forgive me, Lassiter. I’m forgetting my manners. What do I have to do for Alice Lang to get Ms Lang to go to New Hope Island?’

‘She’ll only go if I go.’

‘Very romantic,’ McIntyre said, smiling because he thought he understood suddenly the source of his visitor’s new-found self-esteem. ‘I’m touched.’

‘Would that be a yes or a no?’ Lassiter said.

‘How would you feel about going?’

‘Scared, frankly.’

‘Why?’

‘Take your pick,’ Lassiter said. ‘I didn’t like the look of that spectral urchin Shanks filmed. I’m not crazy about the way Alice Lang says Shanks met his death. I did not like having that film can under my own roof. It made me suddenly accident-prone. And the business with Ballantyne’s watch in that museum basement in Liverpool gave me quite a turn, as you know.’

‘Yet you’d go?’

‘It’s a mystery that wants solving, whatever happened on New Hope. The world has waited a bloody long time.’

‘And you need to be there if things take a hazardous turn, I suppose. You need to be there if your damsel encounters distress.’

Lassiter didn’t reply to this remark. McIntyre’s housekeeper wheeled in tea on a trolley and he smiled up at her in a polite expression of gratitude.

‘Funny,’ McIntyre said. ‘I’d never have cast you as the knight in shining armour before today. But now I think about it, the role quite suits you.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Just don’t get drunk and fall off your horse.’

Lassiter reached for a slice of almond cake from a tiered arrangement on the trolley. ‘Does that mean I’m going?’

‘There’s been a spot of bother on the island,’ McIntyre said. ‘As yet, it’s unresolved bother. We’ll drink our tea and I‘ll tell you about it.’ He shuffled forward and reached for the teapot. ‘I’ll be mother,’ he said.

The head of McIntyre’s security team had disappeared from the island the previous night. A member of the security personnel, a man called Malone, claimed to have heard a scream in the vicinity of the cottage built on the island by David Shanks while on patrol at roughly the time of the disappearance. A second member of the security team, Jarvis, had been patrolling the opposite end of the island from Malone and was adamant that he had seen or heard nothing out of the ordinary.

The missing man was a former Royal Marine captain named Richard Blake. He was a veteran with plenty of combat experience and though weather conditions on New Hope had been severe the previous night, he was expertly trained in endurance and survival techniques.

Blake had not had a designated second-in-command among his team of five. But a former Parachute Regiment NCO called Paul Napier had assumed the role. Napier had requested and received the help of the construction experts building the expedition’s headquarters. He had requisitioned firearms they had with them. He had secured the perimeters of both their HQ and his own team’s camp and then organised a search for Blake. They had found nothing. In the small hours, after several hours of trying, they had finally patched through a radio message to McIntyre’s London office to advise them about events on the Island.

Napier had requested permission to inform the coastguard of the disappearance, a legal and moral obligation McIntyre had been woken to personally accede to. The search had resumed in the morning. There was still no sign of Blake. The coastguard helicopter had been scrambled and awaited weather fit to fly in to begin a search for the body off the Island’s coast.

Lassiter said, ‘Would that be the Paul Napier? The same bloke who was awarded the Military Cross a couple of years ago in Afghanistan?’

‘I don’t think there can be two of them,’ McIntyre said.

‘He sounds like an impressive individual.’

‘Pure luck on our part,’ McIntyre said. ‘I delegated recruitment of the security personnel. I can’t do everything myself. It seems the company was chosen on the most competitive quote. They were just the cheapest outfit, frankly. A head rolled in my London office over that particular false economy last night. I’ve also sacked the existing team.’

‘You mean the surviving team. Blake will almost certainly be dead.’

‘The surviving team have been dismissed. Better people, in stronger numbers, are already on their way.’

‘That seems a bit hard on Napier.’

‘I spoke to Napier personally in the early hours of this morning. He advised me on the new security recruits. Effectively they’re hand-picked. He’ll lead them. I’m hoping this is his first and last experience of crisis management on the island, but I feel happier knowing he’s there.’

‘I wonder what happened to Captain Blake.’

‘That trail will be very cold indeed by the time you get there, Lassiter. We’ll have a better idea in the meantime, if the coastguard recovers a body.’

‘Any theories you’d like to float?’

McIntyre shrugged. ‘Blake was single and he had no children. Strictly speaking marines are the navy, but in reality he was a combat soldier age had obliged to leave the military. The suicide rate is disproportionately high among men sharing his profile when they leave the only family they’ve known. I suspect he felt he’d endured enough of life. I suspect he waded into the sea. He could avoid the stigma of self-murder because no coroner could rule out the possibility that he slipped or was taken by a freak wave.’

‘And the scream heard by Malone?’

‘Maybe the water was cold.’

Chapter Nine

Alice had not derived the information she wanted to when she’d touched the cine film can. She was not in control of her gift. It dictated to her what it was that she saw. She had actually wanted to know something about the nature and fate of the apparition Shanks had filmed on New Hope Island on that blustery, black and white day back in 1934. She had not expected to witness his last moments of life. She felt no empathy for the man or sympathy for his predicament. Patrick Lassiter had told her that he’d been expelled from an artistic community in Cornwall for dabbling in black magic. She thought that people who did such things probably deserved what they got as a consequence.

She had not even been curious about Shanks, really. But she had been very curious about what had happened to turn a little girl into the spectral predator that was the subject of the film shot by Shanks on New Hope.

She had been transformed into something lurid and terrifying. She was a ghost, wasn’t she? She was a tormented soul who represented all the children lost to their own rightful futures on New Hope Island. Alice wanted to know what had happened to her and her brothers and sisters and cousins and schoolmates and friends.

She had to know and she believed when she got there, her gift would enable her to see it. She might even be forced to see it, she thought, with a shudder. It would be a revelation of awful clarity. But she suspected that this task was what she had been given the gift to accomplish.

She was afraid. She was frightened of the presence that had squatted observing David Shanks in his last moments on the cliff top at Moher in County Clare. Denser than the night, too large and far too still to be human, it had watched gleefully as Shanks bid a careless farewell to his long and bedraggled life. In some way it had coaxed and encouraged him. Or had it just filled him with such morbid dread that the plunge to the rocky waters below represented a sort of escape for him?

Had it followed him there from the Hebrides? Was it some vile thing he had conjured through a baleful spell and been unable to govern properly? Did it slouch around the island, living still, guarding its domain? She didn’t yet know.

Alice valued her life. She valued its possibilities with the flawed, clever ex-detective she now realised she had probably loved without realising it for several years. Only when she’d come to in his flat, in his arms, had her feelings for him finally become obvious to her.

She didn’t want to place Patrick Lassiter in danger and she suspected that the island to which they were going remained a hazardous destination. But she had to go. It was what she had been given her gift for. It was her destiny. And he had to go because in helping solve the mystery of what had been done there he would find some sort of purpose. When that happened, she believed he would discover the thirst slowly killing him was finally and utterly quenched.

The rifle felt good on Napier’s shoulder. Its action was almost antique to a man familiar with the SA80 semi-automatic assault item supplied as standard to every infantry unit of the British army. But the SA80 had proven to be a dismally unreliable weapon. Bits fell off it. It jammed when it came into contact with sand. It jammed sometimes when it didn’t come into contact with sand. It was inaccurate and overheated far too easily.

The weapon on his shoulder used a small calibre bullet. You would have to shoot for the vital organs or the head to have success in stopping any human target in its tracks. But Napier was an excellent shot.

Anyway, he did not expect to have to use the rifle in anger. It felt good in a symbolic way. Troy had suggested he keep it, for the duration. It represented the respect the construction guys had for him and he was starting slowly to rekindle for himself.

He had found something. He had lied to McIntyre about that. He had been obliged to do so because the thing he had found would have panicked the others, or spooked them, he thought.

He felt a bit sorry for the Seasick Four. They were on the quay now, in the harbour, waiting for the fishing smack to take them to the mainland as the coastguard chopper lapped the island’s coastline looking for a body Napier felt confident would never be found.

Blake’s disappearance had turned him from a loser into a winner literally overnight. That was something to ponder on, but the time for pondering on it wasn’t now, because there were much more urgent things to think about.

The fishing boat had hove into sight. In another hour or so, the seasick four would have departed the island for good. Troy and his men were scheduled to fly back to the mainland later in the afternoon, their work accomplished and the weather benign enough today for their flight. They would leave Brennan behind because the radio hardware wasn’t functioning without severe and so far unexplained glitches. His own replacement crew would be here tomorrow morning.

It meant that Brennan would be all he had for company — and backup — for about 16 hours, some of them dark. They had a rifle apiece. Brennan was temperamentally sound and really, would they be any worse off? Napier had no intention of allowing either himself or Brennan to stray into what he regarded as the danger zone, at the other end of the island, in the vicinity of the cottage built by the crofter, David Shanks.

That was where he had found the object in his pocket. That was where he had found the bloody relic that told him for sure that Captain Bollocks was no more. It had lain in a tiny skid mark of blood and saliva on the stone floor and he had seen it straight away. He had covered it with a boot until the others vacated the cottage and began their search of the surrounding land and the shoreline a hundred metres away. He had bent at the knee and swiftly plucked it from the floor and concealed it. It was a single tooth, an incisor, and it had belonged to Blake until it had been plucked from his head with sufficient brutal force to leave a circle of torn gum around its root.

What possessed hands that could do that to a man? Napier didn’t know. What possessed the inclination to do it? Again, he had no ready answer. He’d seen the debris of men blown to pieces by roadside explosives and artillery assaults. He’d never in his whole military experience seen anything like that, though.

To him it seemed mostly like a contemptuous act of mutilation. Like a clue, too, left behind to signal the Captain’s fate. And lastly, like a trophy, left rather than taken because it was there on display in the cottage for any passing visitor to contemplate and enjoy.

He remembered that the New Hope Island community had vanished leaving nothing human behind. Not a hair, nor even a fingernail, ran the story he had been hearing on and off since his own schooldays. But then he couldn’t now be dealing with whatever had accounted for the New Hope Island settlers, could he? Nothing lived for almost 200 years. Nothing human, anyway, he thought.

Edith had lied to her mother about her contact with Jacob Parr. He did not confine his visits to her dreams. And she was afraid of him. She didn’t think that he meant her any harm. She didn’t even think that he’d chosen to seek her out. But she knew that he was a ghost and she thought it was quite natural for children to be afraid of ghosts and at 14, as grown up as she was, she knew that by anyone’s definition she was still a child.

Parr was scary. How could he not be? He was from another time. He knew that he was dead. He’d returned reluctantly, apparently compelled to do so. Whatever had forced Jacob Parr to summon himself into ghostly life and visit her, Edith thought the really frightening aspect of the whole business. Someone or something had done it. It scared Jacob Parr, whatever it was, and he was dead and you would have thought the dead had nothing to be afraid of.

She didn’t even want to think about that, really. Parr himself was uncomfortable discussing it. He made it obvious he’d come against his own wishes. He was churlish and sometimes seemed barely in control of a mean temper. But he’d been told to come to her and he’d obeyed and he was frightened of whoever had done the ordering and so was Edith, who thought you had to be something very sinister and serious indeed to scare the life out of a ghost.

She’d told her mother Parr was kind. And he could be. But he was a creature of moods. Most of the time, he was melancholy and wistful. Sometimes he was boring, regretting aloud the way he’d frittered away his last years before the drink had killed him. Edith’s personal opinion was that it was a bit late in the day to moan about that now. Get a life, she was tempted to say, listening to him go on. But he’d had a life, hadn’t he, and he had completely wasted it.

Once, he showed her his scars. They were furrows ploughed into the flesh of his scrawny back by the leather knots, he said, of the lash. He’d been lashed on two occasions. Brine had been thrown over his bleeding back in bucketfuls to clean the wounds. The salt from the seawater had stung more than the flogging, he said. But he’d been caught drunk on smuggled grog and Captain Ballantyne had been a master, he said, who knew no shred of mercy before the mast.

He only ever came to her when she was alone. For this reason, she didn’t know if any of the other girls at the school could have even seen him. She knew he was real and not a figment of her imagination. The song had proven that. He had enjoyed singing in his lifetime. He enjoyed it still. He had enjoyed teaching her to sing and play The Recruited Collier.

He’d learned the words of the song himself by listening to others sing it, he told her when he came to her on the evening of the day of her mother’s visit to the school. But he could have read the lyric written, so he could, he said. Reading had been a rare accomplishment in his lifetime, among men of his lowly station. But he’d been taught to read aboard the Andromeda by the ship’s surgeon, Mr Horan.

Horan liked me to sing, he recalled, softly, seated at the end of Edith’s bed in his sailor’s whites and his frayed blue coat. She saw that the pewter buckles on his shoes had tarnished with neglect and that his pigtail was starting to free itself in fine strands from the tar into which it had been dipped, which was now dry and crumbling. She could smell an odour, sweet and cloying on his breath, she assumed was grog.

And she knew again that these were details she could not have dreamed or made up. The man had lived and was dead and something fearful had summoned him to her.

Mr Horan did not like the screams in the night from the slave hold, he said. They distressed him. And so he would ask me to sing and to play the accordion to drown out the sound. And in gratitude for this service done him, he kindly taught me to read.

Horan the surgeon was a generous and sensitive soul, Parr said. He was too soft-hearted altogether for the cruel trade the ship he served on plied. Most of the men could ignore it. It tormented him. Life was hard and life at sea even harder. The pay on the slave vessels was good and it was steady. Best to take your wages and watch where your eyes and ears strayed and pay as little heed as was possible to the occupants of the hold on the leg of the voyage from Africa to the West Indies, or to the coast of America. Such was the strategy of sensible men.

But Thomas Horan seemed incapable of doing that. Parr did not know whether it was conscience or curiosity. Something impelled him to communicate with members of their human cargo. They did not benefit from his medical skills. Ballantyne would have forbidden it and it would have contravened the company rules. But Horan spoke to them. They stirred his interest and his compassion in their bleak and fearful plight.

It was because of Mr Horan, Parr explained that night, that he had come to Edith. Horan had kept a journal aboard the Andromeda. He had done so in secret. It was Edith’s job to seek this journal out, should it still exist. And when she had discovered it, she should give it to her mother to read. It was vital that her mother read Horan’s journal.

‘Does it contain answers my mother needs about New Hope?’

‘I do not know what it contains,’ Parr said. ‘I never so much as saw it. I know nothing more than what I have been told to tell you. You must seek the journal out and show it to your mother. That’s as much as I can say.’

‘How do you know about the journal, if it was written in secret?’

‘I have been told.’

‘Told by Thomas Horan?’

‘Horan is long dead.’

‘So are you.’

‘But Horan rests in peace,’ Parr said, with a chuckle.

And you don’t, Edith thought, because you’ve been sent to see me, by someone who scares you, someone party to Horan’s secret, someone who has the power to make a ghost do things against its own stubborn will.

She saw that Jacob Parr was smiling. And she knew that she was seeing her spectre for the last time. He’d fulfilled his obligation. He had passed the message on. The message about the physician Thomas Horan’s journal had been the whole point of her haunting. It was all to do with Captain Ballantyne and New Hope Island and the expedition her mother was shortly to join.

She wondered would she fall asleep that night and awaken in the morning unable to remember the song he’d taught her, like in a fairytale. She didn’t think that she would, any more than she would forget about him. He smiled at her, a last show of his rotten teeth before rising soundlessly from where he sat and walking out of the door, closing it softly behind him.

She wondered how she could possibly find the secret journal containing the information her mum required. She didn’t even begin to know where to look. She was allowed an hour a day on the computer and thought that an internet search was the obvious thing. But she was unlikely to find it on Google, was she, if it had remained a secret for nearly 200 years?

Edith thought it a very tall order for a 14 year old. She would have to make a list. She knew that there was a Maritime Museum in Greenwich in London but didn’t think that 14 year olds would very likely be given the run of the library there. She thought that Thomas Horan might have living relatives who had inherited his stuff. But she thought it unlikely they would welcome enquiries prompted by the ghost of one their ancestor’s shipmates.

The thing was, she had a feeling that this was a matter of great importance and urgency. She had to find a way to accomplish it. She just had to. She was totally the wrong person for the job but it was vital and there was no time at all to waste.

Karl Cooper wanted to sleep with Lucy Church. He was fairly confident that the Hebridean adventure would create the right chemistry for that to happen. But if Lucy was as attracted to him as he thought she was, she might start to try to find out more about him and might discover that his track record with women was not exactly sweetness and light. She was a journalist, after all, and had a reputation for thoroughness. She would know how to dig.

If she didn’t do that and just took him at face value and slept with him, her doing so gave him another potential problem on the trip. Jane probably harboured feelings for him still. Almost certainly she did. And if Jane knew he was sleeping with Lucy Church, that provocation might goad Jane into telling a few home truths about him to Lucy.

Cooper smiled to himself. These were the sorts of dilemmas success brought a physically attractive man. They were not exactly a novelty to him; he was used to complications. They were nothing he could not handle when the time came to deal with them. He would find a way to subtly undermine Jesse Kale. He would entice sexy Lucy Church into bed. And he would somehow charm or placate poor spurned Jane in a way that would make her feel flattered and special.

Ballantyne was still alive. He was sure of that. They would not have been so negligent as to let the leader of the transposed community simply perish. Keeping a mortal man alive and well for two centuries would be a completely unremarkable achievement for a civilisation as advanced as that of the visitors.

The captain of the Andromeda, the founder of the New Hope Island colony would be alive. And Cooper would be the first man from the modern age to meet him and shake his hand and ask the questions in his first interview about what had happened to him. The ratings would be stratospheric. The event would make Karl Cooper a household name around the globe.

It would give his broadcast career the boost it needed, take him to the next level. No longer confined to the subject of space, it would be a short step to sharing the stage with world leaders as his interview skills teased out what the global public wanted to hear. He would have the profile and status he craved and, frankly, deserved.

The competition on the expedition would come directly from Jesse Kale, 15 years younger than he was and with a legitimate reason in the public mind to dress like Indiana Jones. It was Cooper’s privately held opinion that Kale was an outrageous exhibitionist. But he had the credentials and he got good ratings, which would be no bad thing when they were obliged to share screen-time on the trip. Their joint billing would deliver a huge audience when the film came eventually to be released.

Cooper had decided already that he would be publicly matey with Kale. Superficially, he would be wise to foster a mood of upbeat camaraderie. He could maybe establish a big-brother to little-brother relationship with the archaeologist, so coming across as warm and affectionate, whilst undermining him by posing subconscious questions about his experience and maturity.

There was time for a workout, before looking at the clothes his stylist had brought him to consider for the trip. He would hit the gym. For a moment, he imagined the appreciative look on the pretty face of Lucy Church when she saw his ripped body naked for the first time. Life is good, he thought, thinking that over the forthcoming weeks, it was going to get immeasurably better.

James Carrick could think of nothing he wanted less in life than to waste the next few weeks of it in the God forsaken Herbridean wilderness of New Hope Island. It was one thing maintaining his bluff philistine persona on the editorial floor. And he could do it effortlessly on the breakfast television sofa for an hour as he talked celebrity cellulite and super-injunctions. He suspected it would be a struggle, though, on the forthcoming expedition. It would mean living with the loud and odious twat he pretended to be not just for eight hours a day, but constantly.

It was funny, when he considered it. Lucy Church was of the sincere belief that he thought in nothing but clichés. That was because to his colleagues, their features editor was himself a living breathingHebridean cliché who spoke in banner headlines using a tabloid vocabulary and delivered his one-liners in conference as though they were written in bold.

He would miss his family. He could count the nights he had spent away from his wife in single figures. He always tried to get home in time to bath his children for bed or to read them a bedtime story. After they had been lulled into slumber, he liked to watch them as they slept before stealing a goodnight kiss. Then he went downstairs and shared a drink with his wife and then he would spend an hour in the study on the novel only she knew he was writing. This was his ritual and he treasured it.

He was in the study now. There was an image on his computer screen. It was a photograph his wife, Lillian, had asked him to look at. She hadn’t explained why. There seemed nothing out of the ordinary about the shot, though he didn’t recognise the subject as one of Lily’s friends. Distractedly, he brought the image up to full screen size. He would have to wait for Lily to finish whatever it was she was doing in the kitchen and come and tell him what the significance of the picture was.

Obliged to consider the New Hope expedition, it had occurred to Carrick that they were an obvious member light in their array of experts. Ballantyne had been a very bad man, before his attempt to represent himself as just the opposite. Surely they should take a priest with them to the Hebrides. Surely the expedition was crying out for a legitimate man of the cloth. What if what had happened there had been demonic in its origin? In that case a well-respected exorcist would round out the team very nicely.

He didn’t seriously think that anything satanic had occurred on the island. Carrick was not a natural believer in conventional religion. He did believe though, that McIntyre and Marsden too had missed a trick in not publicly speculating on the demonic possibilities.

It was too late now, which was a pity. They could have had a lot of fun with it. Evil became contagious when the Devil was involved. Places were contaminated by it. They became damned and haunted and intrinsically bad. Suddenly, the phrase No Hope Island, seemed less a jocular pun than a grave warning above a story in a late edition; a sombre picture of a suitably photo-shopped rock outcrop accompanying it, some goat head bit of granite with anthropomorphic horns. What a wasted opportunity!

If the place were evil, in the absence of a cross-carrying Vatican veteran that would have to be Alice Lang’s territory. With her sensitivity, she would surely be aware of it the moment her feet hit the ground. He’d have to keep an eye on her. It would, though, be a purely professional eye.

Carrick forgot about Alice Lang when his wife walked through the study door a moment later. He was reminded, as he was every time he caught sight of Lily, of the reason he had married her. He was not smug or self-congratulatory. He just considered himself an exceptionally fortunate man.

She gestured at the picture on the computer screen. She said, ‘It was on my camera. The little Lumix you bought me? The camera you bought me for my birthday?’

‘That’s what I bought it for, darling,’ he said. He stood and kissed her on the mouth. ‘I bought it for you to take pictures with.’

‘But I didn’t take this one.’

‘You must have.’

‘I took 20 pictures of Martha’s birthday party.’ Martha was their daughter. They had celebrated her eighth birthday the previous weekend. ‘This is number 21. I was downloading the birthday pictures onto my laptop. And this pops up.’

‘You must’ve taken it.’

Lillian shrugged her shoulders in a gesture of exasperation. She smiled, but the smile was tight. ‘Where did I take it?’ She said.

Carrick glanced down at the screen. It was a good question. The florid carpet and heavy wooden fittings suggested nothing so much as the interior of a Victorian pub. His wife did not frequent pubs. Not alone, with her camera, she didn’t.

‘Who the hell is she?’

The subject of the picture was a tall and striking woman seated behind a pub table gripping a book. She wore a black tailored coat with a double row of gilt buttons. She had pale skin made even paler by the geometric severity of the black bob in which her hair was styled and lipstick that was a vivid red on her unsmiling mouth. She had eyes a brown so dark they almost matched her hair. They were staring into the lens. The stare was frank, disconcerting.

‘I have absolutely no idea,’ Carrick said.

Chapter Ten

Napier’s new recruits had been on the island for 48 hours. There were eight of them, him commanding them and Brennan still in the communications centre, homesick now and increasingly frustrated with the high tech kit still stubbornly failing to function properly.

Brennan could establish no consistent communication with London at all.

‘You know what I think,’ he said to Napier, after a fruitless morning fiddling with various dials. ‘I think that when the aliens landed here and took all the settlers away, their ship did something weird to the island’s mineral deposits.’

Napier sipped coffee and considered this. ‘In what way?’

‘I don’t know, precisely. But their ship would have been massively powerful. It could have corrupted the island, geologically.’

‘You mean like radioactivity?’

‘Sort of, but not exactly, or we’d be dead, or dying of leukaemia, or developing tumours and going bald and blind. But sort of like that, some sort of sonic discharge.’

‘That’s without question the most stupid theory I’ve ever heard,’ Napier said.

Brennan smiled. The smile was rueful. ‘I know it is,’ he said. ‘But something is blocking our signals. I mean, listen to it, Paul. You ever heard anything quite like it?’

‘Just turn it off,’ Napier said. ‘That little girl crying noise is depressing. And it gives me the creeps.’

There was a knock on the door. Napier opened it to see Davis, one of the new men, lean and alert, every inch the ex-commando he was. ‘A word, Sir?’

They all called him Sir. He possessed no military rank. And he was not a status conscious man by nature. But he was in charge and he knew the men were more comfortable acknowledging the fact. They were all ex-soldiers and they felt more secure with a command structure. The British army was not a democracy and they liked what they were used to.

Napier sensed a shit-storm approaching. The radio failure he was sure was a part of it. He had established no clear pattern to it yet but the storm was on its way and he thought it would hit them sudden and severe. That was his instinct. They needed to maintain their discipline for when it came.

‘What’s up, Davis?’

‘Not exactly sure, Sir. I thought I saw movement up by the crofter’s cottage on the western point.’

‘What sort of movement?’

‘A figure, Sir.’

‘A seal, maybe?’

Davis shook his head. ‘It moved too fast. And it was slight, and clothed.’

Davis; 38 years old, hair worn in a salt and pepper crew cut, shrapnel graze on his left cheek, eyes hard and hazel coloured and pretty much unreadable at that moment. Eyes that had seen quite a lot, Napier thought.

The men had orders not to enter the cottage David Shanks had built. That didn’t really affect the integrity of their perimeter security. There were high points from which anyone approaching the cottage by sea could be clearly seen. They were manned and the new men were vigilant.

There were ten men including Brennan on the island. The expedition personnel were due to arrive in five days’ time. The vague sense of being spied upon had not left Napier but he no longer entertained the notion that New Hope was covertly occupied by any other people. Something was there, but it wasn’t human. Even if it had been once, it wasn’t human anymore.

He looked around. It was a grey morning, the light limited by louring cloud, the sea a limpid green toiling, almost motionless. The air smelled of rain and salt and wood smoke from the driftwood fire the men kept burning in the camp. It wasn’t particularly cold. They kept the fire burning for good cheer, Napier thought, rather than for warmth. That and perhaps as men had in camps since ancient times, as a means to keep unwelcome spirits at bay. Some things mankind did compelled by instinct, or collective memory.

‘Come on,’ he said to Davis. ‘We’ll take the scenic route.’

They walked around the island, from east to west, at the edge of the water. Napier was tense, expecting his short-wave to crackle into life with a burst of static as one of the two men occupying their observation posts on the high ground spotted movement at the crofter’s cottage and radioed to report it in. But that didn’t happen.

He was aware of the crunch of shingle under his booted feet. He was aware of sluggish waves breaking to his right without rhythm. He was aware of his companion in his combat fatigues, an unreadable look still in his eyes when he glanced at Davis.

He felt a sense of wariness growing with every stride he took. He kept picturing the pale incisor with its skirt of torn gum ripped from the mouth of Blake, left lying on the flagstone floor of the one room hovel to which they were headed. And he had to fight within himself for wariness not to descend on the route into a mood of abject dread.

They saw the roof of the cottage come into view. Its remaining slates glimmered wetly in the greenish light. It seemed to rise before them as they approached, its walls wet with sea spume and its windows ragged, like an absence.

They stopped about 50 feet away.

‘Can you feel it?’ Davis said. He shivered.

‘Feel what?’

‘Come on, Sir. Don’t play dumb with me.’

‘Yeah,’ Napier said. ‘I can feel it.’

And he could. He felt watched. It was a coldly uncomfortable sensation. It was not the vulnerability you felt sometimes in the field. It was not precisely hostile. It was curious and contemptuous and, Napier thought, it was gleeful, as though they were being toyed with. His skin pricked with it and his scalp itched. He could not stay there and endure it.

‘I’m going in,’ he said.

It seemed to take longer than it should have to walk the distance to the half-ajar cottage door. He became aware of the silence, a numb departure from the island norm of screaming gulls and crashing surf. The air felt thick, tangible. He felt almost giddy, breathing it. He thought he heard a snatch of song and it stopped him dead for a moment. It had drifted through the open cottage windows.

He’d imagined it. There was no one in there. His sentries would have spotted their approach. Davis had just imagined what he thought he’d seen earlier. It had been a trick of the light, no more than that. He’d seen for just a fragmentary glimpse the wing of a scavenging bird, perhaps. It had been a frond of sea kelp, borne by the wind.

Except there was no wind, was there? And there were no birds about. Stillness ruled this region of the island. It had the mood about it of approaching death.

‘Don’t, Sir.’

Davis, behind him, spoke as if from a vast distance away, his voice dreamy and disembodied.

Napier pressed on. It was what you did. He remembered Blake’s constant bleating about not being armed. Funny the things you remembered at such moments. Had he ever in his life experienced a moment like this? He didn’t think the weapon existed that could help him just then. Nor did he think he had ever been so frightened. Fear filled his mouth with a coppery taste and foreboding gripped his stomach so it felt as though his entrails churned between strong and playful fingers.

He had reached the cottage door. He pushed it open. The silence was so profound now it felt like a rebuke. He looked around at the bare stone of the walls. He looked at the naked flags on the floor. He saw that a single word had been scrawled in chalk on the flag directly in front of the cold and derelict cottage hearth. The word was Hell.

The scrawl was childish. There was no stub of chalk. The characters were fresh. The work had been done recently. Davis had been right. There was a faint odour in the cottage, but Napier couldn’t identify it. It was corrupt, a hint of something decaying or decayed, but he couldn’t have said what. He dropped to his haunches and spat on the scrawled word and rubbed the chalk away with his sleeve. He didn’t want the others seeing it. He did not want the dismay he felt at seeing it scrawled there shared.

He rose to his feet and walked out into light and space. The air felt fresher and a gull shrieked in the sky and a wave tumbled and he no longer sensed the chilly prick of observation on his skin. He looked at Davis. He managed a smile and a shrug. ‘Nothing,’ he said, thinking, we’re in a lot of trouble here. The badness has not left this place. Over time, it has just grown more bitter and stronger, hasn’t it?

They trudged back without speaking, eyes on the shingle, thoughts unshared. They were about 500 metres from the camp when Davis stopped and turned and looked Napier directly in the eye. ‘Don’t laugh at what I’m about to say,’ he said.

Napier said, ‘I don’t think that’s very likely.’

‘I did a training secondment in Africa about 15 years ago, in the Congo, with the French. There was an atrocity there. There was a ritual killing. A child was killed and mutilated. It was black magic, powerful Ju-Ju.’

Napier licked his lips. They were dry. The chalked word had claimed all the spit he’d had.

‘You know what Ju-Ju is, Sir?’

‘I can imagine.’

‘You could feel it,’ Davis said. He glanced around, at the sea and the sky and the land; a visual inventory of their remote little wilderness. ‘I could feel it there and I can feel it here. Do you believe me?’

‘Well,’ Napier said, quietly. ‘I’m not laughing, Davis, that’s for sure.’

Jesse Kale felt nothing but admiration for the cosmologist, Karl Cooper. He considered that Cooper had provided the template for his own media career. Cooper had proven that the formula worked and Kale had simply worked the Cooper formula in turn. He looked forward greatly to meeting the man who had inspired him. He thought it would be a privilege to work alongside his unwitting mentor on such a high profile project as this one seemed likely to be.

But that was not his reason for agreeing to participate. Nor was he doing it just to further his own reputation. A family secret explained the reason for his agreeing to go on the expedition and it was one his family had closely guarded down the generations.

Kale had a blood link with New Hope Island. He was related, on his mother’s side, to three members of Seamus Ballantyne’s vanished community. They had not been Kales but Morgans — sharing his mother’s maiden name. He had been brought up on the story of the vanishing and the opportunity to try to solve the mystery was one he could not in all conscience resist.

He knew no more about the vanishing than anyone else did. But he knew quite a lot more than most people about the nature of the community and the character of its charismatic leader. He knew something of the faith they had originated and their religious rituals. He knew what the community had been intending to achieve in its isolation. He knew about the polygamous way in which the community had lived and the customs and practices they had originated.

All of this knowledge was secret. Everything would be revealed only when his own skills had been used to crack the mystery of where the people of New Hope Island had gone. He didn’t want the plaudits for solving the New Hope enigma, so much as he sought closure for his family over their lost loved ones.

This was why, to his own mind, the interview he had given Lucy Church had lain so lifeless on the page when it was written up and printed. He’d kept quiet about what he really thought because discussing it would have told someone as sharp as she was that he knew an awful lot about the New Hope community that simply wasn’t in the public domain.

Sipping his freshly percolated breakfast espresso, tapping out his blog update and attired to hit the gym, he realised how very much he was looking forward to the field discoveries and academic glory New Hope offered him personally.

Much as he admired Cooper as a media role model, Kale thought the man’s New Hope speculations a total crock of shit. Kale didn’t believe in Alien life, beyond the odd microbe living a bleak amoebic existence on a far flung planet endowed with a bit of frozen hydrogen. Even if you accepted the possibility, why on earth would they travel to earth if they could? If they had that technology, they would be so far advanced intellectually, that they would be to human beings as humans are to slugs.

The soil would surrender the secret of New Hope Island. The soil and the rock, the topography, would tell him what he needed to know to put paid to this enduring mystery. He would examine and chisel and dig. He would analyse samples. The science would be painstaking, the study rigorous and the findings definitive. He owed that to history, to his audience and not least, Jesse Kale owed it to his family.

Fortescue took the call because he recognised the name. He knew that the television virologist, Jane Chambers, was going on the New Hope Island expedition. He read the papers. In doing so, in following the story, he had become rather a fan of Lucy Church’s writing in the Chronicle. And of course he had a vested interest in the expedition itself. It was a reluctant interest, but one he’d been unable to deny or effectively ignore since his own fateful close encounter with the contents of Seamus Ballantyne’s sea chest, five years earlier.

‘How can I help?’ he said.

‘I read about you in the Chronicle. You have Captain Ballantyne’s belongings in your basement, Professor Fortescue.’

‘It’s not my basement, not strictly speaking. Can I take it you are Jane Chambers’ daughter, Edith?’

‘I am. I mean in the basement of your museum.’

‘I do. We do. How can I assist?’

‘I rang the Maritime Museum in London. They wouldn’t speak to me.’

‘Well, I’m speaking to you. Please call me Philip. How can I assist?’

‘Do you believe in ghosts, Philip?’

Fortescue, who very much believed in ghosts, closed his eyes and gripped the receiver so tightly that the plastic squeaked in his fist. This was a child, for Christ’s sake, a girl of no more than 13 or 14, from the sound of her voice. But some things were beyond decorum or shame. Malevolence did not observe boundaries. ‘Yes, Edith,’ he said. ‘I’ve been given cause to think ghosts could well exist.’

‘Then you might be able to help me.’

She told him about her ghost. She told him about Jacob Parr and about kindly Thomas Horan and Horan’s secret journal and Parr’s urgent instruction that she find the journal somehow and pass it on to her mother. But she didn’t know how to find it. The museum in Greenwich hadn’t put her through to anyone important enough to know whether it was there. She hadn’t got past reception. The British Museum had told her they only corresponded with members of their reading room and those members were all over the age of 18. And they all had account numbers and computer passwords and laminated passes. And Edith had none of those.

‘Who advised you to contact them?’

‘My history teacher, Mrs Atkinson did. I just said I wanted to trace a historical document. I said it was nautical. She’s mad for sources.’

‘Aren’t we all,’ Fortescue said. ‘Who suggested you contact us?’

‘That was my own idea. I read about Ballantyne’s sea chest in the Chron. I thought you might be able to help. As a last resort.’

‘Cheers.’

‘What?’

‘Sorry. That was inappropriate. I was being sarcastic.’

‘Well. Adults are, sometimes. Can you help?’

‘There’s something you haven’t told me.’

‘There isn’t.’

‘There’s a detail you’ve left out.’

‘I hate it when adults do this. It’s patronising. I’ve told you everything.’

‘Trust me girl, there’s more.’

‘Girl?’

‘I have a sister not much older than you. A half-sister, actually, but that’s not the point. The point is, you’re not the only adolescent in the universe.’

‘There isn’t anything I haven’t told you.’

‘Does your mother know about Jacob Parr?’

‘Yes. The school told her.’

‘How did the school find out?’

‘Because of the song he taught me.’

Fortescue closed his eyes and smiled. His grip on the phone receiver was sweaty now. He made a deliberate effort to relax it. ‘Tell me about the song, Edith.’

So Edith did. She told him about The Recruited Collier. ‘My music teacher, Mr Clayton, says a lady called Kate Rusby sings the song. She’s quite famous.’

‘The Barnsley Nightingale,’ Fortescue said.

‘Where’s Barnsley?’

‘It’s in Yorkshire, Edith. It’s where I expect you’ll find Thomas Horan. Or rather, you’ll find there anything Horan might have left behind. Horan will have been a Barnsley man. Parr couldn’t tell you. So he gave you a clue.’

‘Why couldn’t he tell me?’

‘We don’t need to concern ourselves with that just now.’

‘It doesn’t matter anyway.’ She sounded suddenly forlorn. ‘My school is in Surrey. I’m 14 years old. I’m a boarder. I can’t possibly go to Yorkshire.’

‘No,’ Fortescue said. ‘But I can.’

Chapter Eleven

Four days before the expedition’s scheduled departure for New Hope seemed rather late to be bringing up the subject of the priestly omission from the team. But Carrick’s professionalism obliged him to do it anyway.

That morning’s editorial conference was the last they would have before the experts assembled at a Heathrow photo-call and the Lear jet chartered to take them to Edinburgh. From Edinburgh a fleet of helicopters would chatter in squadron through the skies, transporting them and their packed and crated gear to the island.

McIntyre was there in person. This was only the second occasion on which Carrick could remember him having actually attended.

‘You’re absolutely right, James,’ McIntyre said, ‘we should have included an exorcist. One of us should have thought of it. In hindsight, it’s a startling omission.’

‘Diabolical,’ Lucy said.

‘It’s not too late,’ Marsden said.

‘It is,’ Carrick said. ‘Lucy is a bloody good writer, but it’s too late to profile anyone now. It would need to be an in-depth piece. We’d have to debut them to the readership. I can’t think of an exorcist already well enough known to the public. Can anyone else?’

‘We run it as a news story,’ Marsden said. ‘We announce that an exorcist has been parachuted in. We hint that something disturbing or shocking has happened on New Hope Island that’s left us with no choice but to include a heavyweight man of the cloth. We don’t need to be that specific as to what. We just inflate our candidate’s credentials in a separate story on an inside page.’

‘That’s brilliant,’ Lucy said.

‘Thank you, Lucy,’ Marsden said. ‘I want the interview from you you’re doing today with our psychic, by noon tomorrow. And I want a sidebar on this copper, Patrick Lassiter she worked in tandem with. Am I right in saying he’s going to the island, Alex?’

McIntyre said, ‘Your front page exorcist splash is only brilliant if we can find one prepared to do it at three days’ notice. That’s hardly feasible, is it?’

‘It might be,’ Carrick said. ‘There’s a Belgian exorcist who’s been involved in some high profile cases of possession over the years. I think he’s based in North London. He can’t be publicity shy, or I wouldn’t have heard of him.’

Carrick’s use of the double-negative registered with Lucy, who was more fastidious than her immediate boss was about good grammar. So did the name of the priest he was referring to. ‘Father Degrelle,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen him in a TV documentary. He’s been on the radio quite a lot too. I think I might have seen him once on Question Time.’

‘He’d do Desert Island Discs if he was asked,’ Carrick said. ‘He’s addicted to publicity.’

Marsden said, ‘How do we land Degrelle, at three days’ notice?’

‘We contact his superiors in the Catholic Church hierarchy,’ McIntyre said. ‘I offer to make a substantial donation to the charitable cause of their choice. Theirs is a vast organisation with a constant and pressing need for funds for establishing missions and repairing buildings and remunerating lay staff.’

‘Not to mention paying compensations to child sex-abuse victims,’ Lucy said.

‘James is right,’ McIntyre said. ‘The expedition needs an exorcist. And so we buy one.’

When the testosterone took over, Lucy tended to let the men get on with it. She found the chest beating a bit tedious.

Degrelle, if they got him, would be the last of the interviews. Technically it was second to last, because she had the Lassiter side-bar to write. But that was only a 500 word phoner and would concentrate on the police work he’d done in the past with the help of the psychic.

Detectives were dull men generally. They were methodical types who spoke in that weird constricted phraseology the Met seemed to indoctrinate them all with at the Police Training College at Hendon. Lassiter would have no quirks or individuality. He was interesting only by association because he’d worked with Alice Lang.

Soon after conference had broken up, she brought up a number on her cell phone and made a call.

‘Jane Chambers.’

‘How do you avoid catching all the horrible diseases you research? Are you just inoculated against everything?’

‘Lucy! I’ve been meaning to call you.’

‘I’m the one who should have called. You’re fully occupied with a grown-up job.’

‘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 discreet 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 than 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 lunchtime 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 who Elizabeth Burrows was and what it was he wanted to know about her. 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 by.’

‘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.

‘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. 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.

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.

Degrelle 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 somewhere. 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.’

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.

‘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.

Chapter Twelve

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.

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 37 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 were 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 accidental 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.

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 odd, because that’s precisely what you’d expect of a crew 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 think 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. They 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.’

‘Good luck locating a signal,’ Walker said.

Davis said, ‘I wouldn’t worry too much about keeping it confidential, Sir. It’ll probably be all over tomorrow’s paper. Empty boat, chock full of gear washes up on New Hope Island? It just adds to the mystery, doesn’t it?’

‘It’s a pretty good story,’ Walker said.

Not when you’re living it, Napier thought. His mind was on the cameras aboard the boat. He wondered what the film inside them had recorded. If something unusual occurred, it would be a cameraman’s instinct to start shooting it. Had they filmed their own approaching death? Had they documented their own last terrifying moments of life? It was a morbid speculation, but the place they were in encouraged those. Davis and Walker were probably the most phlegmatic of his lads and even they were pretty thoroughly spooked.

These cameras had a monitor enabling you to view what you had just shot and self-edit, didn’t they? He would have to take a look. He did not greatly look forward to doing so but to do otherwise would be negligent and even foolish. Forewarned is forearmed, the saying went, and Napier as a soldier had pretty much lived by that conviction. On New Hope, though, it was becoming increasingly difficult to believe.

Fortescue called Lassiter. He made the call for two reasons. The first was that he had enjoyed no success at all in trying to track down Thomas Horan in Barnsley. There were a handful of residents there sharing the ship’s doctor’s surname. But the genealogical records he perused showed no connection among any of them with a physician ancestor who had once served aboard the Andromeda.

He had a growing intuition that there was not much time left to locate the lost journal and heed whatever warning it contained for McIntyre’s expedition and its assorted members.

His second reason for calling Lassiter was the document he now held between his white-gloved hands. It was a slender booklet, just a few pages hand-sewn at the spine, mottled with age but still legible, its words described in sooty ink in a slightly shaky hand. Given its contents, he thought the tremor perfectly understandable.

He had found it, shortly after reading the newspaper article, on the library shelves of his own museum. He was not absolutely certain of what it was. But if it was what he thought it might well be, it was a document history insisted simply did not exist.

There were believed to be no written accounts anywhere of life among the New Hope Island community. But Fortescue was convinced he had stumbled upon exactly that. He further believed, on the basis of the events it described, it had been written at a time very close to the vanishing.

There were barely 24 hours left before the expedition team were scheduled to leave for New Hope. Lassiter was booked to go.

The document between his hands was not dated. But he thought it too obscure to be a forgery. Provenance was not really an issue. Neither was authenticity. He looked from the desk he occupied in the library, up to the shelves which had concealed it. He looked at his mobile, placed neatly parallel with the edge of the desk. He had the room to himself. He had the necessary privacy. He was, though, a punctilious man. Before he made the call, he would give what he had discovered one last read.

Each morning the Master ascends to the heights and awaits the arrival of the bird that never comes. Seeking guidance in this manner is a thing that sorely hurts him. We have never been obliged or beholden. It is not our way to beg or beseech. But we are no longer blessed, either, it seems. We must do what needs to be done to lift the Great Affliction and the master as ever leads by example in his humble and desperate compromise.

This morning another two were gone. That is five to feed the hunger in a week. The Morgan girls were taken from us. The loss is terrible. We cannot endure it. Our family will simply perish over a season of anguish and despair if this continues.

It is the devil’s work and horrible. It also seems to us all to be unjust. We have lived humbly and austerely. We have traded honestly. We have hurt or offended no one. Our isolation has always been more a condition to endure than to celebrate; the elements harsh and the situation bleak and the comforts sorrowful scant.

Faith has been our consolation. But was ever faith tested in such a manner as this among men and women who love and worship their God? In my old life I was a scholar, a studious man and a student of history. I can recall no ordeal I have read of the equal of the Great Affliction for the fear and crushing hopelessness it provokes.

Each day the Master rises from his sleepless bed and climbs to the heights and awaits the bird that never comes. His patience and fortitude are quite wonderful qualities. Those of us who still survive wonder how he sustains them as he watches his Kingdom of Belief erode and dwindle.

Faith also erodes and with it, authority. There are voices among us speaking openly now in discordant tones. The family is cleaved, no longer one. There are those among us but no longer of us saying that the Master has himself delivered the Great Affliction. It sounds like treachery. Worse, it sounds almost a heresy to make this claim. No man could have expressed his remorse more convincingly. None could have paid a heavier price in repentance than he has for his past sins.

Aye, say the dissenters, but we are all paying the price for his past. And we will go on doing so until the last of us is gone before the debt to God is finally honoured.

Forgive me for the impertinence of committing such an arrogant claim to the page, but God does not work in this way. The Master may have jeopardised his own immortal soul. That is a matter between him and the Almighty. It may be that he has been responsible for deeds so dark and outrageous to our Maker that he is indeed damned. But the Great Affliction is not the work of God. Of this, I am convinced even if recent events have dulled the distinction between that which I can and cannot rationally accept is true and real.

The weather has brightened. The sky is an unsullied blue and the sea azure beneath its colossal canopy and calm. The sun shines, bathing the land in a warm light that stirs scents from the ground, subtle and sweet. On such mornings it is almost impossible to believe the predicament in which our settlement finds itself. Then you look up and see the Master perched like a statue on the heights, or like some carved figurehead, its wooden gaze unblinking, waiting for the first glimpse through that endless blue vista of the bird that is never going to come.

The Great Affliction claimed three victims last night. The Morgan girls were taken, as I have stated already. Young Barton was found hanged by his belt from the pulley gantry at the harbour when dawn broke. He was already stiff, had resolved to end his life by the look of it the previous night not long after darkness fell. It was pitiful, watching them cut him down. He was only 13 years old.

The grief was evidently too great a burden for his young heart to bear. He was all that was left of his family and could not tolerate their absence from his life. Either that or he could not endure the dread of awaiting his turn to become himself one of the perished at the Great Affliction’s whim.

We carry on. Somehow, the dull routine of toil seems to make men and women oblivious in the immediacy of what they do to their general plight. And so we fish and weave baskets and distil the whiskey that will now never be sold and gather wool and sow oats and mend nets and patch clothes and school children in the matters of reading and writing and arithmetic.

And for all I know, as a single man and life-long bachelor, the married among us still couple in the night for comfort or through passion in the warmth and intimacy of their beds. Intimacy is an illusion now, of course. But all comforts here are an illusion, truth be told.

The evil come among us makes hope seem a scornful jest and prayer for deliverance a babbled nonsense. There is no hope. There is no prospect of deliverance. Even should the impossible happen and the bird come, nothing will change. Will Barton, wise beyond his tender years, knew that. But self-murder is a mortal sin and so offers no escape for a devout soul.

Fortescue called Lassiter. There was silence on the other end of the line until he had finished speaking. Then there was a pause so charged it was almost audible.

Lassiter said, ‘Where did you find it?’

‘There are some books here at the museum salvaged from New Hope after the vanishing was discovered. One of them is an atlas. Some of the really detailed maps are folded flat into envelope arrangements so they can fold out bigger than the dimensions of the book when you study them. I opened out a map and there it was, concealed in the fold, tucked and hidden there.’

‘Why were you studying the map?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Just answer the question.’

‘It was reading that piece Lucy Church wrote about the psychic, Alice Lang. I thought that if I handed something from New Hope from the period of the vanishing, I might have an intuition, the way that she does.’

‘You wouldn’t want one of her intuitions.’

‘She’s very attractive. Either that, or she takes a very good picture.’

‘She’s the former.’

‘You’re a lucky man.’

‘Read it out to me.’

‘Read the whole account?’

‘You said it wasn’t particularly long. Read it aloud.’

Fortescue did. When he had finished he said, ‘What do you think?’

‘I think it’s genuine and doesn’t tell us very much. Except that whatever the Great Affliction was, it panicked Ballantyne into communicating with the outside world.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘What do you think the bird is all about? You think old Seamus was a twitcher?’

‘I thought it might be symbolic, a metaphor or bit of religious symbolism. Birds feature heavily in religious mythology. Doves are connected to peace and hope. Ravens are harbingers of death, aren’t they?’

‘The bird he’s looking out for is a carrier pigeon. He’s waiting for information from someone, which means that he’s asked someone somewhere other than New Hope for advice or assistance.’

‘Where?’

‘How the bloody hell would I know?’

‘Sorry.’

‘Anyway you should be asking who, not where. And a more pertinent question would be, about what? We can now safely rule out mass suicide. And this Great Affliction doesn’t sound much like any epidemic I’ve ever heard of. The spread of contagion is too slow.’

‘Unless you think of AIDS,’ Fortescue said.

‘That’s a fair point, which I’ll concede. So none of the major theories are either ruled out or confirmed by what you’ve found.’

‘There’s a hint of mutiny. Of mutinous thoughts, there is.’

‘There is. But a mutiny would either have been successful or successfully suppressed. Everyone wouldn’t have just vanished as a consequence of rebellion. Obviously something nightmarish was occurring on New Hope. But I think this account poses more questions than it answers.’

‘Will you help me track down Thomas Horan?’

‘Your timing isn’t the best, professor.’

‘Sorry.’

‘You keep saying that.’

‘Will you?’

Lassiter was silent. Then he said, ‘Was Horan married?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the lucky lady was named?’

‘Martha Jane Garland.’

‘Good.’

‘Why?’

‘Good because Garland isn’t Smith or Brown. Trace the genealogy of Barnsley families with his wife’s maiden name. He would have changed his to hers. That’s my hunch.’

‘Why?’

‘Out of shame, Professor. He was ashamed of what went on aboard the Andromeda. He colluded in it. He drew his pay from the profits of a trade he knew was evil. He enjoyed an officer’s status aboard the ship. The company that owned the ship saw to it that he was clothed and fed and berthed. He may have suffered sufficient remorse in later life to try to become someone else. When people do that, the first thing they change is the obvious thing. They change their name.’

‘He might have used his mother’s maiden name.’

‘He wouldn’t. To have done that would have been a perceived slight on his father. He did not wish to slight his father, but himself. In a sense he will have wanted to eradicate himself. He’ll have taken his wife’s surname. I’d bet money on it.’

‘You were a really good detective, weren’t you?’

‘You’ve no idea how cruel the past tense can be, Professor.’

‘You were though, weren’t you?’

‘Yes. I was.’

‘What went wrong?’

‘Thirst intervened.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I was a drunk.’

‘Past tense again?’

‘I very much hope so, Professor Fortescue.’

‘I’d actually prefer it if you called me Phil.’

‘Then I’m Patrick to you. Just don’t do that Scouse abbreviation thing, because I can’t abide being called Patsy.’

‘I won’t.’

‘Keep me up to speed on your Horan journal search, Phil. Edith Chambers is right. It is important. Something specific and highly significant occurred aboard the Andromeda and we need to know what it was.’

‘I’d probably find it quicker if we looked together.’

‘I’ve a personal interest in the continued wellbeing of Alice Lang, Phil. I’m not delaying my departure for New Hope even for a day. I’m going with her.’

‘I thought you’d be more willing to help, after your experience in the basement here and after your encounter in that pub, when you left the museum.’

Silence.

‘Patsy?’

‘What did I just tell you about calling me that?’

‘Sorry.’

‘What happened in Liverpool is precisely why I’m going with Alice to the island. She’s determined to go. I have to go with her.’

They said their goodbyes. Fortescue put his mobile down on the desk thinking that Patrick Lassiter was a very fortunate man. This was neither because he had conquered his personal demons, nor because of his imminent departure on an expedition the whole world seemed intrigued about. It was because he had never felt so strongly about a woman as Lassiter so plainly did, and he envied him the unselfish strength of that attachment.

Chapter Thirteen

McIntyre threw a cocktail party on the eve of the expedition’s departure. Attendance wasn’t mandatory, but Lucy thought it would have been a rash member who spurned their invitation. By the time the pictures of the event were published in the following morning’s paper, the people wearing black tie and evening gowns and baring their photogenic smiles would be aboard a Lear jet taking them to Edinburgh and the choppers that would deposit them and their investigative hardware on the island.

Even to her deliberately jaundiced eye, they looked a glamorous collection of experts. Karl Cooper, despite the vanity and apparent taste for domestic violence, looked like a matinee idol slipping gracefully into grey-templed maturity. Jesse Kale had a swaggering charisma, brain and brawn immaculately attired and almost twinkling in the happy galaxy of the other guests. When Cooper and Kale huddled, it was like a moment, Lucy thought, from one of those buddy movies with a pair of competing leads.

Jane Chambers was poised and slender in black silk and a diamond choker, her blonde hair worn loosely, splashing across her shoulders. She had a hauteur Lucy knew to be a total and even poignant misrepresentation of the woman’s complex character. It was skin deep at best. But in a situation as glitzy and superficial as this one, it worked.

Alice Lang’s sexuality was more blatant than Jane’s. Her full-lipped mouth wore almost a pout in repose. She had a ripe, succulent look, voluptuous even in the sober grey trouser suit she wore. Again, the air of serene sensuality she exuded was far from being the complete picture. Or story, come to that. Lucy had the sense that Alice was afraid of her gift and lived almost in dread of the revelations it forced upon her. She was almost a martyr to the awful truths it disclosed.

Degrelle, that terrible priestly show-off, wore a cape. Lucy did not think a cape an item of clothing many men could wear without looking ridiculous in the second decade of the 21st century. But the exorcist did not look foolish in the slightest. He looked dashing and formidable, with his club fists and brooding air of an ageing pugilist. As she had said in the piece he had complimented her on moments earlier, he resembled a cleric prepared to look for the knockout in the championship rounds in the ring with Satan himself.

James Carrick, she was starting to worry about. He had a slightly haunted look. His usual bonhomie was missing. His hail-fellow-well-met persona was absent without leave and Marsden and McIntyre were highly likely to notice it had gone and demand it return immediately. It was much of what the paper paid his salary for. They had not hired a gloomy introvert. He had aged about ten years in the two weeks since he had announced, in that late night phone call, that he was the second staffer going to New Hope. He had sounded casual. Fraudulently so, she now realised.

‘There’s less to me than meets the eye,’ he had always been fond of saying. ‘Deep down inside, I’m really shallow.’ Lucy was beginning to think that the opposite was true. To her own astonishment, she felt a stab of pity for her department head she had never dreamed he would evoke in her.

Patrick Lassiter was the major surprise. In the file pictures, in his Met days, he had looked rather sallow and slightly hollow-eyed. In the flesh, he was tall and handsome and his brown eyes were shrewd and focussed. He held your gaze when he spoke to you and he was articulate and considered and sometimes mordantly funny in what he said.

Looking at them all, chatting casually to them in McIntyre’s cathedral-sized atrium, she felt quite proud of the work she had accomplished for the paper in the lead up to the moment of departure. Her profiles had made a family of them. She had skilfully fostered the feeling that they were united in their cause, bonded in their ambition to finally crack one of history’s most stubborn mysteries.

Her feeling was that the nation was collectively rooting for the New Hope expeditionaries. They were intrepid and adventurous. They were knowledgeable and fearless and were widely admired as such. She had written her features about them with that supposition in mind.

Almost as if reading her thoughts, McIntyre approached her. He beamed. He seemed not so much happy as exultant.

‘Seeing them assembled like this makes me realise what a grand job you’ve done, Lucy, and just how hard you’ve worked on this. You deserve to be congratulated.’

‘Thanks. I’ve never enjoyed working on a series more.’

McIntyre sipped champagne. His eyes roamed the room but she had his attention. ‘Do you say that out of vanity?’

‘It’s nice to get the prominent by-lines and have an audience of millions reading and discussing your stuff. But I think it’s because I’m so sold on the story myself. I’ve been fascinated by the mystery since I was a child. Rather like you, I imagine.’

His eyes swivelled to meet hers. They narrowed. ‘Think we’ll solve the mystery?’

To her own surprise, she realised it was not a question to which she had given sufficient thought. She had not really considered it, since doing so briefly prior to her initial phone interview with Jane Chambers and their discussion of the epidemic theory.

‘I do,’ she said. And suddenly, she knew with certainty that she really did. ‘I don’t see how we can fail.’

‘Frankly, neither do I,’ he said. ‘You’ll be there when the moment of revelation occurs. You will witness history.’

‘You won’t be there yourself, Mr McIntyre?’

‘Wouldn’t wish to steal someone else’s glory,’ he said, ‘though I shall visit, once the mystery is irrefutably solved.’

He treated her to a courtly bow and moved away. And Lucy wondered which of the competing theories her paper’s proprietor believed would finally prove correct. He was rumoured to be close to Karl Cooper. Cooper denied it, but James Carrick’s gossip was almost always factually reliable.

She saw Carrick, standing by himself, staring into his champagne cocktail with unfocussed eyes over by the main entrance. Or exit, she thought, thinking that doors worked both ways in her capricious trade and that James needed to shape up pretty soon or Marsden would be shipping him out.

That was the sort of mixing of metaphors that the old James would have celebrated gleefully. But the new James didn’t look in the mood at all for wordplay on the subject of dismissal. Lucy wondered could he be talked round. Loyalty obliged her to try so she walked across to where he stood.

‘I’d offer you a penny for them,’ she said, ‘but that would be a grossly inflated price.’

He smiled, or tried to. The result was not a success. ‘I’m thinking of resigning, Lucy.’

‘You’re kidding me.’

‘I’m not. I have two kids, a wife with a heavy shopping habit, a large mortgage and negligible savings. I also have a really terrible feeling about this whole misguided adventure.’

‘Why do you think it misguided?’

‘I don’t know. I mean I don’t know specifically. I just know that the thought of getting on that plane tomorrow morning fills me with dread. There’s no other word. I’m not just not looking forward to this. I’m actually dreading it.’

‘Are we discussing a premonition?’

Carrick blew out air. ‘I think it might be.’

‘Premonitions are surely Alice Lang’s department,’ Lucy said.

‘No, they’re not. She’s psychic. But she sees the past, not the future.’

A waiter came by bearing a tray of tiny biscuits piled with caviar and soured cream. ‘The condemned man ate a heart repast,’ Carrick said. But he shook his head and waved the man away without taking anything from the tray.

‘I’ve never seen you like this.’

‘I’ve never been like this, not in public.’

‘Don’t do what you’re thinking of doing. Don’t throw your career away, James. Not over the prospect of a few windswept weeks off the Scottish coast. It’ll be tolerable. It might even offer moments of fun. The New Hope mystery will get nailed for good and all and a delirious McIntyre will sanction generous bonuses all round.’

Carrick tried to smile again, his second unsuccessful attempt. ‘If you sold mobile phones for a living,’ he said, ‘you’d starve to death.’

‘I’m not the one about to jack in my job.’

‘Which you’ll probably inherit, yet you’re trying to convince me to keep. You’re a very nice person, Lucy. You’re both talented and good. I don’t think I’ve told you that often enough. I might never have said it, in fact. There’s a lot of things I should’ve said but never did.’

‘You’re sounding like a suicide note.’

‘There are other jobs. I’m not unemployable.’

‘When are you thinking of doing it?’

‘No time like the present,’ Carrick said.

‘Sleep on it. Please just sleep on it. It won’t be the end of the world if you’re a no show at the airport. Give yourself between now and tomorrow morning. You might see things completely differently in daylight, James.’

He frowned. He leaned forward and kissed Lucy tenderly on the cheek. There was nothing sexual in the gesture. It was a spontaneous display of fondness and respect and she took it as the compliment it was. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Lucy. I’ll do as you suggest.’

Lucy felt a tap on the shoulder and turned to face Karl Cooper, smiling his stellar smile, his eyes gravitated firmly towards the cleavage her Empire style dress revealed.

‘You don’t normally dress like that.’

‘I’m dressed for the occasion.’

‘Jeans and a leather jacket are more your style. And that Zippo lighter for your American cigarettes and the Harley Davidson, of course. Practically trade marks.’

‘The bike was a Triumph Bonneville and I sold it last year. I don’t court celebrity, Mr Cooper.’

‘Karl, please,’ he said. ‘You might not court celebrity, but thanks to the expedition, you have a high public profile. Lucy Church is practically a household name.’

She nodded. She knew what his inference was. Thanks to people like me, was his unspoken coda. It was undeniably true. She was becoming famous, or at least sort of famous, by association. ‘Do you think I should feel grateful?’

‘I think you should agree to have dinner with me.’

‘Share dinner for two, on New Hope Island?’ She laughed. She was incredulous. ‘Boil in the bag over a Primus stove?’

‘Conditions might be more luxurious than you think,’ he said. ‘Our patron has deep pockets and a considerate nature.’ His voice was deliberately soft but his cheeks had coloured. He was not a man who enjoyed being made fun of and it showed.

‘I think I’ll take a rain check, Karl.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘rain is something the Hebrides has plenty of.’

Nothing at all had registered on the first of the cameras. It looked brand new to Napier, as though the lens cap had never been removed and it had never even been switched on. The lens cap had been removed from the second camera, though. In common with the first, it was digital and again, no images had been captured on it. It had been turned on, but there had not been time to point it at anything and the monitor just registered a dark flicker he assumed was the out of focus hull of the boat, pictured in cloudy darkness.

There was sound, though. The second camera had recorded the sound of what had gone on. The screams of the men who had been aboard were anguished and terrified and though this deathly soundtrack was only a couple of minutes long, it seemed to go on and on to those enduring hearing it. Then it finally stopped. The men listening to it looked at one another without apparent surprise.

‘You were right, Walker,’ Napier said. ‘None of them made it.’

‘It came at them too fast,’ Davis said, ‘and in darkness.’

‘They saw it though,’ Walker said.

‘Unless they just felt it,’ Napier said, ‘whatever the fuck it was.’

No man is an island. That was Napier’s belief, unless maybe if your name was Seamus Ballantyne. Except that Ballantyne and his entire community had come to a sticky end, hadn’t they? No man is an island; it was the reason he had shared this experience with Davis and Walker. He hadn’t been able to face it alone.

Earlier, he had shown them the gruesome relic retrieved from the crofter’s cottage after Blake’s disappearance. They were good men. He needed allies in this, whatever this transpired eventually to be. He even told them about The Recruited Collier and the clay pipe he’d discovered, still warm, what seemed about a century ago, but was only a fortnight past. Neither of them laughed. It transpired that Walker was a Kate Rusby fan himself. He’d seen her at the Cambridge Folk Festival two years on the trot, he confessed.

They were silent together after listening to the sound of the crew and passengers aboard the rigid inflatable perish in the night. Napier knew it had not been the sound of men in the water, drowning. He had heard that once after a NATO training fuck-up in heavy fog off the coast of Norway and awful as it had been, this was worse. Something predatory had got them, something hungry and formidable in water too cold for sharks.

He reached for the whisky bottle. Troy, the construction ganger had left it for him as a parting gift and he was grateful for it now as he poured a slug into each of the mugs of tea the three of them had. It took the dry edge off the powdered milk. It delivered much needed warmth to the belly. It was wholly against the rules laid down by the people paying them but Napier was of the belief that the game had changed to the point where entirely new rules were required. In the material absence of a superior, he felt wholly justified in framing them.

To Napier, Walker said, ‘Davis told me about that stuff he saw in the Congo, Sir. Wasn’t talking behind your back. He told me he’d told you too.’

‘And I told him about that morning at the cottage,’ Davis said. ‘The point is all the lads have sensed it, Sir. The island isn’t right. It’s wrong in a powerful way. It’s corrupt in a way that’s much worse than Africa was.’

‘Worse in what sense, Davis?’

‘Bigger. More powerful. It’s concentrated near the crofter’s cottage. But it’s everywhere on the rock.’

‘It was offshore when it got those blokes,’ Walker said, nodding at the camera.

Napier was silent for a long moment. Then he said to Davis, ‘What’s the mood?’

‘It’s pretty sombre, Sir. The lads are spooked. They’re game enough but none of us is armed and even if we were, you can’t fight shadows.’

‘You can look at the positives,’ Walker said. ‘We’ve taken no casualties. Our unit is intact. We have food and fuel and shelter. We’re being paid.’

‘We’re doing our job,’ Davis said. He laughed, without humour. He gestured at the camera, ‘When someone’s not doing it for us.’

Napier said, looking at Davis, ‘Your word, corrupt, strikes me as the right one to describe this place. But Walker’s right too. We’ve taken no casualties. We’ve retained our unit strength and capability. The integrity of our camp remains uncompromised. I’m as unnerved as anyone on the island. But we’ll be at full expedition strength here in less than 24 hours. The island will be crawling with new personnel. Now is not the time to request evacuation, boys.’

‘Agreed,’ Davis said, nodding.

‘Walker?’

‘I’m like all the lads, Sir. I shit bricks at night here, but I trust your judgement. We all do. We know what you did in Afghanistan. The bottom line is you lead and we’ll follow.’

It was difficult not to look at the camera, not to think about the murky anguish of the night screams it had recorded. Napier had lost his nerve in Afghanistan. He knew that, just as he knew that to some extent at least, he had recovered it since. He thought it would be tested here, again, in this awful place. The experts and their various bits of pricey paraphernalia would arrive in the morning. And his private belief was that they would make no difference to the threat they faced at all.

McIntyre brooded in his library after the departure of his last guest. He sipped brandy and pondered on the events he had personally sent careening into motion.

Latest figures showed the circulation of the paper had now risen 40 per cent since the announcement that the expedition was scheduled to begin. Ad revenues were up 60 per cent. Pagination had increased by 30 per cent. They had gone from running two to four editions on the newsstand every day. New Hope Island had captured, or recaptured, the imagination of the world.

And in the face of all this achievement, McIntyre felt none of the triumph he had anticipated he would. Instead, he felt hollow and even slightly afraid. These were new and unwelcome sensations and he thought that he knew what had engendered them in him.

It was doubt. He was beginning to doubt his own theory as to the nature of the New Hope vanishing. Ever since Lassiter’s discovery of the cine film shot on New Hope by David Shanks, the case to be made for activity there beyond the rational had been steadily stacking up.

He could no longer dismiss the spectre on the film as something Shanks had conjured in his own amateur dabbling with magic. Lassiter’s experience in the basement of the Maritime Museum in Liverpool contradicted that theory. There was something malevolent and unnatural about the contents of the sea chest and the chest had belonged to Seamus Ballantyne.

And there was the way that Shanks’s wraith was attired, wasn’t there? The spectre had been dressed in clothing from the time not of the crofter, but of the settlement. It was a detail that could not be glossed over or blithely ignored.

The slave-ship master had brought something evil with him to New Hope Island. It had festered and grown and destroyed his community. This unearthly affliction had been spiteful and destructive. It had not arrived from another galaxy, aboard a spacecraft armed only with enlightened intent.

The events bringing McIntyre around to this belief did not stop with Lassiter’s ordeal at the museum. His respect for the ex-detective was growing all the time, but there was other, compelling evidence. It came from the war hero, Sergeant Paul Napier, and it suggested that what Ballantyne had introduced still capered darkly on New Hope.

McIntyre had made light to Lassiter of Blake’s disappearance. He could not so easily dismiss the empty boat Napier and his people had just found. No one was yet admitting to having organised this attempted spoiler, but someone would have to, soon. There would be high profile broadcast journalists among the missing. They would be familiar faces on the nation’s television screens and they could not simply cease to exist without shock and comment and somewhere, without grief. They were dead. McIntyre, a man who had always trusted his profitable instinct, felt a cold certainty about that.

Napier had told him about the sound recording on the camera. Speaking over the weird pitch of the radio static, the war hero had sounded measured and calm and phlegmatic. And McIntyre had asked him what he thought was going on there. And through that banshee wash of sound, Napier had said, ‘I think the Island is haunted, Mr McIntyre. I think there are spirits living here. They are not abstract. They take physical shape. They conceal themselves, but we sense their presence around us. They are angry and malicious and they wish us nothing but harm.’

Earlier in the evening, he had spoken to the psychic Alice Lang. He had asked her was she really convinced of the authenticity of her gift. Was it not just the power of her intellect, channelled through a gift for intuition? She had smiled and said she wished it were simply that. Her life would be less complicated if it was. He had pressed, asking her how she could authenticate such a vague and insubstantial talent.

She had told him about the suicide of David Shanks, slipping gratefully into the abyss, watched by a gleeful figure bigger than a man and far darker than the night surrounding it. And he believed her, because he knew that she was confiding what was for her, a grotesquely reluctant truth.

He sipped the last of his brandy. It was either very late or very early and he knew that he ought to go to bed. His mood was gloomy and his disappointment growing and there was something else; something like trepidation, a strong and urgent conviction that even now, at this eleventh hour, he could and should call the whole thing off.

But he could not do that. That would be inconceivable. The sense of betrayal felt by the readership would be something from which the paper would never recover. Neither would his own global reputation as a newsman. He was committed to this. They all were. Projects planned on this scale developed their own momentum and the New Hope expedition was now an unstoppable juggernaut of hype and expectation.

He rose, wearily, to go to bed. He glanced at his desk and the spacecraft modelled for him by the NASA rocket men at such outrageous expense. They looked in the jaundiced light like children’s toys. Things will seem better in the morning, he said to himself, knowing in his heart, it was a lie.

Degrelle knelt on the waxed wooden parquet of his cell floor wearing the hair shirt in which he habitually slept. The shirt was the nightly penance paid for his vanity, which he knew was his great weakness and sin. He faced the simple wooden crucifix hung from a nail on his wall. He focussed on the bronze figure of Christ writhing in his death agony nailed there under his crown of brutal thorns. And he prayed for all of them.

He prayed for Alice Lang, whose gift he considered an endowment of the Devil, for the Catamite Jesse Kale and the worshipper of false idols, Karl Cooper. He beseeched God on behalf of Patrick Lassiter, a moral man with a strong intellect and a strength-sapping weakness for drink. He prayed for Jane Chambers, a rational woman who believed that the only cure for any malaise was concocted in a laboratory.

He made a special prayer for Lucy Church. He did so because it was his experience that the most buoyant seeming are sometimes the first to sink when the storm is delivered. He liked her. Of all of them, he thought her the warmest and kindest character; the one among them possessing the most of what gave God’s chosen species their distinguishing humanity. Finally, he prayed for Carrick, who had looked to him at the party like a soul already lost.

When he had muttered the last of his improvised liturgy and kissed the rosary clutched between his fingers he rose on knees numbed by his weight and sat on his truckle bed and pondered on what he knew about New Hope Island and what he had learned in his conversation with the Cardinal when the Cardinal had called and pressed him with all of his temporal authority to join the expedition.

Ballantyne had experienced his moment of epiphany in the autumn of 1799. By that time Wilberforce and the other abolitionists had already been campaigning again slavery for some years. But the slave trade would not be abolished by Great Britain until an act of Parliament was passed outlawing it in 1807. And slavery itself would persist in most of the British Empire until it was finally banned in 1833.

Even after that, ownership of slaves persisted in most of what was regarded as the civilised world. It flourished in America, the cradle of democracy and national champion of the notion of individual liberty, until the 1860s and the Civil War.

The idea that Ballantyne had been an evil man redeemed was a modern conceit, a bit of crude historical revisionism. In his lifetime, he would have been regarded as a successful and prosperous sea captain, not some tyrannical sadist. His later conversion to a faith of his own devising would have seemed the scandalous part.

Through modern eyes he was the practitioner of a barbaric business who tried to pay for his crimes against humanity by establishing a community based on basic Christian principles. He forswore the comforts his ill-gotten wealth had accrued. He sacrificed his status and so lost his wife and well-placed friends. And he chose deliberate exile for himself and his followers in a harsh island wilderness.

Most right-thinking people of his own time would have considered Ballantyne converted mad, bad or the victim of a cruel delusion. He was a demagogue and his followers no more than vulnerable fools.

He preached to his growing Liverpool congregation until 1810. That was the year the New Hope Island settlement was established. So he must, Degrelle concluded, have been thinking about it for a decade. He had leadership and maritime skills and the planning must have been meticulous, because the community prospered. It did not just exist on a meagre subsistence level. It did sufficiently well to produce the surplus to trade.

The vanishing was discovered in the early spring of 1825. A trader called Matthew McCloud had been buying the island’s whisky. He docked to pick up his regular order of a dozen oak barrels of the stuff and discovered to his bewilderment that the New Hope settlers had all disappeared. Lichen grown over the cold peat in the grates of their fires suggested to McCloud that they had been gone about six weeks.

It was a pioneering piece of forensic examination of which Degrelle thought Patrick Lassiter would probably have been proud. He thought it likely to have been fairly accurate too. McCloud dealt in whisky but had not shared Lassiter’s taste for the stuff. He was totally abstemious, his judgement completely sober.

Some of the livestock on the island were discovered by McCloud living feral. Most of the beasts had starved to death in their pens when they ran out of food. The extent of the decomposition of the carcasses was another clue as to the date of the vanishing. The trader put it at about the third week in March.

McCloud did not dwell for very long on New Hope. He had sailed there with his regular boatman and a burly labourer called David Cantrell. Cantrell was the sort of highlander who won caber tossing competitions when he wasn’t brawling in taverns or sleeping one off. He was a giant with a troublesome reputation, but he could lift and haul a full whisky barrel between the ham-locks of his arms which to his employer, was a useful accomplishment.

After a thorough search of the settlement, the three men decided to eat the meal of mutton broth and barley cakes brought with them aboard the boat. The outward leg of their voyage had been stiff and they needed sustenance before the hard tack across the water back to the mainland.

They did not at this point fear anything. McCloud thought the disappearance singularly odd. Bowls had been left half finished, the bread rolls grown stale on the tables beside them. Fishing nets lay on the quayside in a state of semi-repair. The catch still sat, rotten and stinking now, in the hold of one of the anchored smacks. Books lay open halfway through an arithmetic lesson in the small schoolhouse; coats and shawls still on pegs and shoes laid in a neat row at the door.

But he knew from his business dealings with the settlers that Seamus Ballantyne was a mercurial man, governed entirely by the messages in his head delivered by a capricious God. He assumed they had gone in the way that they had originally come, 15 years earlier, on their leader’s whim and without a single murmur of disobedience. He thought they must have chartered a couple of large craft from one of the mainland ports and set out to start again, somewhere else.

It was only after he sent Cantrell to forage for kindling for the fire to heat their broth that McCloud suspected anything really sinister afoot on New Hope. Cantrell habitually sang as he worked, songs delivered in a strong dialect and a sweet tenor voice. McCloud became aware of an abrupt silence and rose from where they had planned to eat before departure and went to find his quieted man.

He came across Cantrell sitting on the ground, cross-legged and weeping, outside one of the settlers’ dwellings. Drool hung from his lower lip and he pointed a shaking finger towards its closed door. McCloud observed that his man was rocking slightly back and forth, like elderly people did in their fireside chairs sometimes when age had robbed them of the capacity to think.

McCloud opened the door. The single room inside was cold and dark and empty. There was an odour the trader later described as a mixture of camphor and fish oil but it was very slight and could have been of no real consequence. He took off his boat-cloak and placed it around the mighty shoulders of the trembling man and coaxed him to his feet as someone might an infant child or someone feeble minded.

Cantrell never disclosed what it was he saw on New Hope that day. Whatever confronted him, if anything actually did, remained forever a mystery. Nor was he ever heard to sing again. The story was that he never uttered another single word until his premature death, a few years later, at the tender age of only 28.

Thus was the legend of New Hope born, to be fostered and then distorted down the years and passing decades. The truth was elaborated. Then stories were simply invented. The island became unlucky, or cursed, or haunted; depending upon to whom it was you spoke. Facts were in short supply concerning either the island or its pious, vanished tribe.

More was known, though, than existed in the public domain. Degrelle had hinted at as much to McIntyre when McIntyre came wooing. He had only recently then heard for himself the new detail from the Cardinal when he nearly let some of that slip. Excitement may have prompted the indiscretion, he thought, though more probably it had been down to fear.

In February of 1823, a 14 year old boy called Samuel Trent had fled the island in an open boat. Against the odds, he had survived the crossing and made landfall about eight miles from Ullapool. He was on the shore, aboard his stolen craft, dying of exposure when a shrimp fisherman found and rescued and resuscitated him. He was grateful to the shrimper, but he never told the man from where it was he had come.

Five years after the New Hope vanishing, in 1830, Trent converted to Catholicism, wishing eventually to take instruction and enter the priesthood. He was by then 21. He had successfully kept his personal history a secret to that point from everyone he had encountered in his years on the mainland. He made his first confession. And what he had to say about his life on the Island so disturbed the priest to whom he made it, that he broke his own vow of confessional secrecy and disclosed the information to his bishop.

It was the detail of Samuel Trent’s confession that the Cardinal had shared with Degrelle to help prepare him for the expedition. He was told about the sins committed on the island. And it was the exorcist’s considered opinion that if his new colleagues on this adventure knew what he was now aware of, they would not for one moment entertain the prospect of going.

Chapter Fourteen

Philip Fortescue was fairly confident that he had successfully identified and located Horan, the Andromeda’s physician. Working on Lassiter’s hunch, he had discovered that a doctor by the name of Thomas Garland had settled in St Bride’s parish in Barnsley in the summer of 1797.

That was a full two years before Seamus Ballantyne swapped slavery and seafaring for the freelance saving of souls; but the chronology was still convincing enough. Horan had in all probability resigned his commission in disgust in the period during which the vessel he had served aboard still plied its lucrative trade.

Garland had been married to a woman named Martha. He had fathered two daughters. Both of the girls had been baptised at St Bride’s. Fortescue did not know whether or not he had been a pious man. Everyone had been a church-goer in the period in which the doctor had lived. Thankfully for genealogists, everyone had been baptised and every surviving parish was obliged to keep its records.

The bad news was that Horan had no living relatives. There was no cache of papers in a precious family archive stored lovingly in a loft trunk at an ancestral pile somewhere. He was not going to get the fairytale ending to this particular quest he had hoped for. The last of the doctor’s bloodline had expired in the summer of 1916 on the Western Front in the First World War when his great-grandson was blown to pieces taking part in a dawn assault.

Fortescue wasn’t put off by this. He had asked the vicar of St Brides could he look at the Parish records personally and had been granted access and an interview with the amenable cleric.

He drove through the sunshine and rain showers across the Pennines, wondering what it was he would find when he got to his destination. There had been no municipal library yet built in Barnsley at the time of Garland’s death. No one called Garland had donated papers to any of the two likeliest scholarly archives he had identified in the locality. It was possible that Garland’s account of life aboard the Andromeda existed in private hands. An advert in the local paper was something he would place only as a last act of desperation.

At the wheel of his Saab, with rain wicking off the canvas roof, he couldn’t help smiling to himself. He was going to Barnsley at the urging of an adolescent girl. He was doing so because she claimed a ghost had asked her to find something important written by a man in secret. She had asked for his help and he was giving it and the Barnsley bit was his idea because the song the ghost had taught the girl to sing in a dream was sung in life by a singer from the locality.

He started to hum to himself. The sun splayed onto the road in a riot of gold and odd patches of vermillion from spilled fuel and the clouds parted before him. It was only when the rain had stopped completely, when it was no longer drumming on the taut fabric above him that he became aware the melody he hummed was, of course, The Recruited Collier.

The Reverend Deal was plump and red faced and as friendly as he had sounded over the phone. He was obliging in the access he offered Fortescue to his registers of births, marriages and deaths. He showed his visitor the christening font at which the Garland girls had been baptised. But he could offer no enlightening clue about a man who had first settled in his parish more than two hundred years earlier.

‘Typhoid killed him,’ he said of the physician who called himself Thomas Garland. ‘I can tell you that. I can tell you he received last rites administered by one of my own predecessors. I can show you the family plot. But I can tell you nothing about the life or character of the fellow whatsoever.’

The family plot. Fortescue wondered would Horan have had his clandestine journal buried with him. Was it clasped in the grip of his mummified arms? Did he literally take his secret to the grave? For a wild moment he imagined himself in the churchyard at midnight, shovelling out the earth, a hurricane lamp swinging from a handy tree to light the scene as he toiled to pry the lid from a lead-lined coffin.

He looked at his watch. It was midday. The expedition members would be in the sky above the Atlantic aboard their Chinooks, clattering towards the island. Lassiter would not be able to talk to him on his mobile now, not with the deafening engine noise inside one of those. Nor would he be able to do so when they landed because there was no cell phone signal on New Hope.

He could not seek the advice of the ex-detective on what to do next. He was on his own. He had hit a wall or drawn a blank or whatever other cliché applied to having exhausted the available clues. His trip to Barnsley had been a waste of time. He hadn’t even justified the cost of the fuel his car had consumed. He hadn’t even managed to establish for certain that Horan and Garland were one and the same. ‘I’ll take a look at that plot,’ he said. To himself, he sounded defeated.

The Reverend tilted his head sympathetically. He said, ‘I’m truly sorry that I can’t be of greater help to you. But there is someone who might be able to shed further light on the life and times of Dr Garland. Emma Foot runs the local history society. She’d be thrilled to meet a professional historian. She’ll probably pick your brains, ask you for a few tips on conducting really thorough and scrupulous research.’

I consult a former police officer who retired due to a chronic drink problem, Fortescue thought. At least, I do when I get properly stuck. He smiled wanly. He said, ‘Won’t Ms Foot very likely still be at work?’

Deal smiled back. He said, ‘Emma was the local librarian, the head librarian, until she retired about four years ago. She’ll be at home. And if she can help you, she’ll be only too happy to do so.’

‘I’d be most grateful,’ Fortescue said.

‘I’ll give her a tinkle.’ Deal blinked up at the sky. ‘She’ll cycle over, now that the rain has cleared, if she isn’t tied up. She lives only five minutes down the road.’

He spent the short wait looking at the monument above the mausoleum in which the Garlands were interred. It was a pillared marble and granite affair that suggested solid prosperity. He was reminded of the chasm that had existed between rich and poor until relatively recent times. Names and dates were etched.

He ran a finger across the name of Thomas Garland hoping it was a lie hewn from stone and that the man reposing among his kin beneath this conceit of cold masonry was actually named Horan and had written something revelatory he would yet find.

He felt nervous. He was almost consumed by trepidation. He’d last felt like this on the phone to Edith Chambers when she told him about Jacob Parr. He was involved in a chain of events that had begun for him when he’d opened that sea chest in the basement of the museum in which he worked. Perhaps it had actually started on the day he was offered his job there.

He was a part of something ominous and fateful and it occurred to him that the spectre of Liz Burrows sometimes watched him only because she knew he was and was naturally curious as to how it would all play out. The thought was not a comfortable one for Fortescue, whose own opinion was that the world would be a much happier and more relaxed place if the dead would have the decency to remember that they were dead and be content to stay that way.

Napier heard the distant whump of the twin Chinooks and saw them clatter low over the sea from the pink horizon to the East. He supposed it was a measure of his new-found status that McIntyre had instructed him to welcome the expedition members formally. It seemed a long time since he had taken part in any ceremonial parade and the ritual of buffing up stirred mixed emotions in him.

He was a decorated soldier. He had served in Her Majesty’s armed forces with valour and distinction and doing so had almost robbed him of his sanity. He remembered having the Military Cross pinned to his peacock chest and he remembered soiling himself, unmanned, when the battle trauma got so bad afterwards that they sectioned him.

He’d wept for a week. The medal lay untarnished in its velvet lined presentation case in his kitbag in his tent there on the island. He smiled as the choppers neared, wondering whether McIntyre would prefer him for this occasion, to wear it. He wouldn’t do that. He was shaved and showered and sober and the boys lined up looking like the crack troops they’d all once been. They looked dapper and alert and they looked a handful. If they were spooked by the island, and he knew they were, it didn’t show on any of their faces.

If anything, they looked excited. Napier could understand that. The new arrivals were not just experts. They were some of them celebrities. Everyone had seen Jesse Kale and Karl Cooper and Jane Chambers on the telly. Whether Jane Chambers was hotter than the psychic, Alice Lang had become a subject over recent days among the lads of fierce debate.

The boys all referred to the women expedition members only by their first names, as though they knew them personally and were already quite friendly with them. Celebrity was like that. You read about people and studied their pictures often enough and they became as familiar to you as the regulars in your local pub. It was the reason people nodded and smiled at soap stars in the street and the supermarket and then went home wondering why on earth they’d done it.

He’d met Lucy Church. He hoped she wouldn’t remember. She’d been embedded for a month at their forward base in Afghanistan. She’d been gutsy and no-nonsense and she’d had a store of filthy jokes. He’d taken her out on patrol. She’d even looked good in combat fatigues and a Kevlar blast vest. He hoped she wouldn’t remember because despite the regard in which Alexander McIntyre now held him, he’d fallen an awfully long way in his own estimation since those days.

The choppers came in with their usual shit-storm of downdraft. Two photographers scrambled out of the hatch of the first to land and took pictures for the following morning’s paper of the experts disembarking. They huddled on the grass in their foul-weather overalls with McIntyre’s company logos plastered onto their backs and chests and sleeves.

He was relieved to see that the women looked as lovely in life as they did in their pictures. Lucy stood, almost protectively, beside Jane. Alice actually looked more in need of reassurance than Jane did, pale and visibly apprehensive.

Kale looked more like a wrestler than an archaeologist, with his brawny build and beard and abundant mane tied back in a ponytail. Cooper looked like he’d rather be wearing a tuxedo. The swarthy exorcist ostentatiously knelt and kissed the ground. There was a grim-faced, shaken seeming bloke in glasses Napier assumed was a staffer from the Chronicle. And there was a tough-looking sallow faced man, tall and in good shape, he recognised as the ex-detective, Lassiter. He saw Lassiter wink at Alice and Alice smile back at him, obviously grateful for the gesture in spite of her nerves.

It was lazy and sometimes even dangerous to generalise. But Patrick Lassiter did not look very much like the drunks Napier had encountered in life. Preoccupied by the thought of their next drink, in his experience they always had in common a sort of willing insularity. Lassiter was alert and empathetic. He was physically fit and fully engaged in the moment. Napier’s first impression was that this was a man who would make a good ally and a formidable enemy.

Lucy strode over, grinning and holding out her hand and Napier thought so much for remaining incognito. Behind her, a crew from the second chopper began unloading the experts’ gear. He nodded to Davis, the signal for Davis to show the new arrivals around their living quarters and field laboratory and communications centre.

‘Colour Sergeant Paul Napier,’ Lucy said.

‘Don’t tell me. You never forget a face.’

‘Not a face as handsome as yours.’

He smiled and said, ‘You’ve already told me the one about the actress, the bishop and the egg-timer.’

She reached into a pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and proffered it.

‘I’ve given up.’

‘Me too,’ she said, extracting one from the pack with her teeth and lighting it with the nickel plated Zippo he remembered from Afghanistan. ‘What’re you doing here?’

‘We’re protecting your exclusive, predominantly.’

She lifted her head and blew out smoke and said, ‘A dangerous assignment?’

‘One casualty so far, missing, presumed dead.’

‘Blake,’ she said, ‘the former marine who walked into the sea.’

‘That’s a plausible theory.’

She looked away from him, around at the island, bright and vivid and windswept in the sunshine, heather and granite and shingle and scrub. A vast sky above them, clouds shifting so fast they seemed to be fleeing it. ‘Hostile territory, would you say?’

‘I would,’ he said. ‘Very.’ Over by the nearest chopper, Kale was supervising the unloading of what looked to Napier like a portable gym.

‘You can elucidate when I’ve unpacked,’ Lucy said.

‘It might not sound very lucid,’ Napier said.

She pinched out her smoke and flicked the butt onto the ground and turned away and said in her own wake, ‘My place at six.’

The retired librarian really did ride a bicycle. It had a basket attached to the handlebars. She was a tall, slender woman who looked younger than retirement age. She had grey hair and clear blue eyes and there was a notebook, Fortescue saw, in the basket. He took this to be an encouraging sign. The reverend made the introductions and then left them and he sat with Emma Foot on a bench in the churchyard and he asked her about Doctor Garland.

‘He was a compassionate man. He had a reputation for kindness,’ she said.

‘Why did you research him?’

‘I didn’t, directly. Do you know much about Barnsley’s history, Professor Fortescue?’

‘I know that its principle industries were glass manufacture and the mining of coal. I know that the town suffered economic hardship in the 1980s, in the Thatcher era.’

‘In common with most of the north of England,’ Emma Foot said.

‘How did you come across Garland?’

‘We’re in the middle of the South Yorkshire coalfield. We’re sitting right on top of the Barnsley Seam. Mining was the principle industry here at the time of Garland’s arrival. I came across him while examining the history of the Elsinore Pit.’

‘He was a physician and his professional experience was gained as a ship’s doctor. What did he do, buy shares in a mine?’

Emma Foot smiled. ‘Mining was very dangerous, in those days. Methane gas poisoned the miners. Sometimes it built up and the flames from their candles and lamps ignited it and it exploded and they burned. Tunnels collapsed causing crush injuries. Breathing in coal dust triggered chronic bronchitis and emphysema.’ She stood. ‘Come with me. I want to show you something.’

They went into the church and progressed along the knave. It was cool and very quiet. Sunshine was strong through the stained glass of the windows, making them glitter and glow in lozenges of coloured light cast onto the stone floor. She pointed to a small window, quite high up and narrower than the rest. The figure of a man was depicted in glass shapes between the lattices of lead. He wore britches and a cutaway coat and pointed with one hand towards the sky as if to symbolise hope or salvation.

‘I think that’s him,’ Emma Foot said. ‘There’s some evidence the money used to pay for that window was raised by public subscription. So I’m assuming, adding two and two together to make four, if you will. But I would safely bet it’s him.’

‘Garland treated the miners,’ Fortescue said, thinking that if his brain turned any slower it would constitute atrophy.

‘And he did so for nothing. They were little better than slaves, back in those days, Professor. No unions, no compensation, no sick pay. 18 hour shifts, often without a break. Many of them were children, by any definition. They worked for very low wages, the miners. And Garland treated those who worked at the Elsinore Pit and he did so free of charge.’

Fortescue looked up at the window. ‘How would they afford to commission the stained glass?’

‘When Garland came here, at the turn of the century, there was an economic depression. Mining was much more prosperous an industry by the time of his death. Working conditions didn’t change, but wages improved. They were honourable people who would have wanted to show their gratitude.’

Coal; the Barnsley Seam, The Recruited Collier, it was all of a pattern and a piece. The song he’d taught Edith wasn’t just a clue, it was Jacob Parr’s mischievous, posthumous jest. Fortescue was beginning to see to where this led. It didn’t lead to a churchyard grave, though the place it did lead to had no doubt been a makeshift grave for some. He said, ‘The Elsinore Pit’s played out?’

‘It was exhausted a hundred years ago.’

‘How many shafts were there?’

‘Three were sunk.’

‘Were any of them sealed in the lifetime of Thomas Garland?’

‘The first of them was. That was the South shaft. It played out in 1808,’ she said.

Fortescue nodded. 1808 was the year that Ballantyne’s old maritime trade was abolished. Thomas Horan, who was by then Thomas Garland, had written a secret journal concerning events aboard the Andromeda. He had come to Barnsley and got to know the miners from the Elsinore Pit.

He had no doubt become familiar with the mine itself. An abandoned mineshaft might have seemed to him a clever place to hide his secret. If it documented a time from a rejected life, he would not have been comfortable having it in his home. It would have sullied the home of a man so ashamed of his own past that he chose to live under his wife’s maiden name.

‘How dangerous would the South shaft be?’

‘It’s impossible to say, Professor. It would need a structural engineer’s assessment and perhaps even a geological survey to tell you that.’

‘And neither has been carried out because the shaft was sealed over 200 years ago.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Could I impose on you to take the time and trouble to show me the Elsinore Pit?’

‘I can take you to it. I can point out the location of the South shaft. What we can’t do is enter the mine. It’s very dangerous, with the risk of subsidence. It’s surrounded by fencing and barbed wire. But it’s located only a mile from here and I’ll be happy to guide you to the spot.’

‘That’s kind of you.’

‘Would you do something for me in return?’

‘I will if I can.’

‘I’ve written the synopsis for a book documenting the history of mining in this area during the Industrial Revolution. I’ve never met a professional historian until now. Would you read the synopsis and give me your considered opinion?’

‘Gladly,’ Fortescue said, thinking if I survive what I intend to try to do this afternoon.

James Carrick unpacked in his room, placing the picture of his wife and children on the bedside locker where he could look at it before going to sleep. Then he switched on his laptop. His immediate task was to write a piece about the journey to the island.

He was to cameo each of the experts in the piece and Marsden had told him to include a paragraph about Lucy Church. In true post-modern fashion its principle architect had become part of the Chronicle’s story. The readers thought of Lucy as every bit as integral to the expedition team as any of its other members.

His article was to be couched as a thousand terse and urgent words. It was a bulletin, not a colour piece, its sketches rapid and its language punchy and its sentences brutally short. It was the kind of thing he was actually quite good at and he was really rather grateful for the diversion.

He had awoken feeling no more optimistic about the trip to New Hope than he had at McIntyre’s reception the previous evening. The difference was that in the sober light of day, he knew that resignation from the paper was a gesture he couldn’t afford. It would cost him too much financially and as a journalist, would kill his reputation stone dead.

He would not be forgiven for the timing of his exit. It was simply too abrupt. You couldn’t be a no-show on a story as big as this. There was no way he could rationalise his abstract unease over the trip to a future employer. He’d be written off as neurotic and unreliable. He’d make himself a Fleet Street pariah. And it wasn’t just about him, this decision. He was the provider for his family.

He worked on his piece for a couple of hours, his concentration intense, thoroughly absorbed in the task, his fingers hovering over the keyboard as they habitually did until the apposite word slotted gratefully onto the blank page of his mind.

He wrote the piece as a word file. When he had finished, he sent it to the office in London as an email attachment. To his slight exasperation, he had to repeat this process three times before the file was successfully received at the other end. And he had to do it using his room’s antediluvian plug-in modem because Wi-Fi didn’t work on New Hope.

Neither did mobiles, he remembered. Neither did satellite or radio phones, with anything like reliability. He would try to use Skype to keep in contact with Lillian and the kids, but if that failed to function properly he didn’t really know what he would do. She would have to get down to Maplin and buy a long wave radio transmitter and tune it to the frequency they were using in the comms centre the security fellow Davis had shown them around. At least he could legitimately put the purchase on expenses, as long as Lily kept the receipt and if all else failed.

He looked at his computer. He was using the portrait shot Lillian had downloaded from her Lumix as his screensaver. There was something fascinating about the woman with the black, geometric bob, seated at the pub table behind her Penguin paperback. Her expression seemed inscrutable until you really studied it. Then it seemed slightly hostile. Stare for longer, and it became vaguely threatening. It was almost as though the picture possessed internal life, a sly measure of intelligence. It was almost, wasn’t it, like a kind of warning about something.

He’d managed to work out the title of the book from the letters displayed on the cover at the angle at which she held it. Her fingers concealed some of the title, but he liked anagrams and had cracked the visible pattern of letters the way you crack a code. The book was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

He stood and stretched out, aware of the size of his growing paunch, probably more aware of it than usual, he thought, surrounded as he was by alpha-males in quite sickeningly athletic shape.

The security guys, led by the traumatised war hero whose name he could not now remember, were probably fit because it was in their job description. Given television’s twin obsession with youth and good looks, it was probably in Kale and Cooper’s job descriptions too.

But the ex-copper, Lassiter, had opted to explore the island by jogging around its perimeter as soon as they’d finished their tour of the compound. He was sinewy and hard looking. And even the priest, though he smoked too much, carried no flab on that huge frame under the black suit he wore. He looked like an old-fashioned heavy, but heavy in the right places, like one of Al Capone’s bodyguards in a black and white archive shot.

Carrick had his kit with him. He’d packed with gloomy resignation but also with the best of intentions. His running shoes and shorts were now on the bottom shelf of the steel locker in the corner of his room.

Wisest, though, he thought, to take Davis up on his offer of orientation before going for a run. Davis had cautioned them about the boggy ground at the centre of the island. He had warned that blanket fogs descended with total suddenness and very swiftly. Better to know the ground rather than to blunder through it blind and winded during a run. Runs were meant to be beneficial. They weren’t meant to kill or cripple you or strand you neck deep in a quagmire.

He decided he would instead go and look at the comms room hardware. He was quite adept with technology. He was an early adapter who liked gizmos and understood most gadgetry intuitively.

It was why he had been secretly amused at the random picture Lily had taken with her new digital camera without knowing she was even taking it. He thought it genuinely endearing, his wife’s technological ineptitude. The best relationships were built on contrasts. He was soft and paunchy. His wife had a svelte figure honed daily during merciless workouts at her health club.

He saw none of his fellow expedition members on the short route from the accommodation block to the communication centre. He saw none of the security personnel either. He knew that they guarded the perimeter of the camp rather than its individual buildings. Theft and vandalism weren’t their problem, journalists from rival media organisations were. He assumed they spent most of their shifts with binoculars vigilantly trained on the eastern approaches to the island, from which direction interlopers would naturally attempt to arrive.

He assumed some or all of their experts were by now at the settlement. That was the location most likely to offer any really compelling evidence of what had happened to the New Hope community. They wouldn’t uncover anything today. This was going to be a marathon rather than a sprint and anyway if they were there, he knew that Lucy would be with them. She’d bonded with Jane. Alice clearly liked and trusted her. And if he was any judge, Karl Cooper had her in his sights as his next potential conquest.

Lucy would witness any immediate breakthrough, in the unlikely event that one came. And they would need to come back to the comms centre anyway to relay anything significant to the outside world, so his going there now did not constitute complacency or negligence. He would have a look at the radio equipment brought to New Hope and rigged up at McIntyre’s expense. He would familiarise himself with the hardware and he would master it.

He might use it to seek a reaction from Marsden or McIntyre himself as to the merits of the piece he had just filed. He could probably get through on the long-wave transmitter and get the other end to patch him through to Marsden’s office. That would display initiative and demonstrate how quickly and well he was adapting to hostile circumstances in the field. It would prove he could thrive beyond what they probably thought of as his comfort zone of Ivy restaurant table and breakfast telly sofa.

It was dark in the communications room. Everything bar the long-range transmitter was switched off. That was on, emitting a greenish glow from the display that showed the frequency wavelength and signal strength. The volume pot had been turned right down and the only noise the set generated was a hum from the interior circuit boards or perhaps the fan keeping its internal workings cool.

What was odd was that the wavelength kept changing. Different sets of numbers kept appearing on the display. They rolled around as if at random, almost whimsically, Carrick thought. The signal strength vacillated wildly. He knew enough about the mechanics of analogue radio engineering to know that the set was not behaving conventionally. He wondered whether some rogue magnetic field or freak incidence of atmospheric pressure might be responsible.

Crank up the volume. That was the first step to getting through to London. He had to transmit on a stable frequency free of static or vacillation if he wanted to enable a cogent verbal dialogue with expedition HQ in London.

He twisted the volume pot a quarter turn and a childlike moan ululated out from the single speaker. It shocked him so much that he jumped. His hand recoiled. It sounded human and disconsolate, pain and abandonment given a voice that was almost unbearable to hear.

The hairs rose on the back of Carrick’s arms and he shivered and the noise from the speaker continued to amplify. There was a forlorn emptiness to the sound, as though it echoed out of some dark abyss of the soul. It was wretched and distressing. How was it getting louder? As he thought about covering his ears with his hands to escape it, it abruptly stopped.

In the sudden, vacant silence, he heard someone behind him. He was aware of a presence in the gloomy confines of the room, to his rear. He thought that perhaps the person was seated in a canvas chair, one of two of them that flanked the door through which he had entered. He could feel the scrutiny, unmistakeable, of being observed. It made the skin of his back and shoulders crawl and he could make no sense of it because he had shut the door firmly on coming in and it had closed with an audible click and he had not heard it open again.

‘No hope.’

The two words sighed out of the speaker. It was the same voice as before but gleeful, now, rather than wretched sounding. Static didn’t form words, did it? Radio interference did not articulate thoughts. A chill ran through Carrick, who reached for the set’s volume pot again and then, before his fingers reached it, turned because the sensation of sharing the room had become so strong he could no longer ignore it.

She was seated in one of the chairs flanking the door, as he’d thought someone was, watching him. Her expression was not quite neutral. Her paperback book was nowhere to be seen. Her clothing looked a bit threadbare, her buttoned coat tawdrier in life than in the photograph his wife indignantly denied having ever taken. Her hair didn’t quite have its photographic lustre. It looked dull and unwashed and there was no light in her eyes at all.

She was tall, when she stood. His last cogent thought was that if nothing else, he’d been right about that.

Chapter Fifteen

Cooper thought the emotion not dissimilar to that created by seeing Stonehenge up close for the first time. You became so familiar with a place through photographs, that you thought you knew it intimately. But real intimacy requires physical proximity and the atmosphere of the New Hope settlement was totally different in reality from that suggested by the pictures of it he had studied over the years.

The pictures naturally took the dwellings as their subject. So they completely failed to convey the isolation in which the settlement had existed. The one-room settlers’ homes seemed tiny and pitiful in the vastness of the landscape; under the dizzying sky and with the sea restlessly stretching away at the margins of the land beneath their feet.

Most of the encircling wall was still intact. It was a dry stone construction and Cooper thought the most impressive feat of building the community had achieved. It was about eight feet high and at least two feet thick. The wooden gate had gone; perhaps rotted away, perhaps salvaged or taken away to be chopped up and burned as fuel through vicious winters by the crofter David Shanks. But the posts were still there and they were strong and substantial, chiselled square and then dug deep in the earth to render the gateway secure.

The roofs of the dwellings had been constructed from timber and straw and so were long gone. The slate roof of the distillery remained. The tannery and the weaving shed had been made of wood and were therefore in poor repair. Their little church had lost its spire and its timber door to time and the salt wind, though the iron hinges that had bound the wood still remained.

Cooper shook his head. Authorities on comparative religion had commented often over the years as to the most singular feature of the church, which was that it had been built entirely windowless. Some said this was a symbolic metaphor for the blind faith onto which the New Hope community had insisted its members hold. Cooper did not have an opinion about that. But he thought that collective worship inside somewhere so dark must have been a sinister experience, particularly in severe weather with the wind howling through the eves and the rain drumming percussively above.

Perhaps they had worshipped by candlelight. Draughts would have caught the feeble flames and made them flicker in the gloom as they listened to their spiritual leader, the gaunt tallow-lit silhouette before them filling them with foreboding as he recited sermons fuelled by fire and brimstone in a voice made strong by years of barking maritime commands to scurrying tars aboard his ship.

He looked at Kale and the ex-cop, Lassiter and the shapely psychic and the priest, who was looking at the church with a frown of what seemed to be puzzled dismay. He risked a glance at Jane Chambers, who was wearing an expression he couldn’t read. Lucy Church smoked. He could see them all because no one had ventured off on their own. It was too unnerving, at first. The instinct, and he felt it strongly himself, was to stay in a protective huddle.

This was not a happy place. It didn’t take Alice Lang’s alleged gift of second sight to discern that. It was bleak and ruined and this high up the wind withered and sang through the abandoned buildings shrilly. It felt remote and lonely and somehow hopeless. He saw the security guy, Napier and walked across to him assuming that this was more familiar ground to him than for any of the rest of them, just because it was so surprisingly strange in life.

‘Come here often?’ he said, feeling the urge on this forbidding spot to attempt to lighten the tone. He spoke quietly, not wanting the rest of them to overhear him.

‘Never, until now,’ Napier said. ‘We were under strict instructions not to contaminate the site. This is the first time I’ve been up here.’

‘What do you make of it?’

Napier shrugged. ‘You’re the expert, Mr Cooper. You’d have more idea than I would. It’s why you’re here, after all.’

‘Karl, please. And I’m asking you. I watched you, watching us, when we disembarked. You strike me as a man who doesn’t miss much. I already know what Jane and Kale and Degrelle think.’

‘And Ms Lang?’

Cooper raised his eyes skywards and then levelled them again and smiled. ‘I’m not a great believer in psychic phenomena. Nothing has ever gone bump in my night. I’ll take your first impressions over hers, Sergeant Napier.’

Napier exhaled a slow breath. He nodded towards the cluster of dwellings. ‘They were prepared to live in hovels,’ he said. ‘But they lavished all that stone and toil on building an eight foot wall. That’s not a boundary, Karl, it’s a fortification. I don’t know what happened to the New Hope community and I wouldn’t even want to try to guess, because I don’t feel I’m remotely qualified to do so. But they were scared of something, I’ll tell you that. I think it’s safe to say that something was going bump in their night. They were scared of that something and they were trying to keep it out.’

He waited for Emma Foot to peddle off before climbing over the gate. The gate was iron and about twelve feet high and it looked a tricky climb and he knew he would be painfully conspicuous to any passer-by while engaged in the act of scaling it. But there were no passers-by. It was a derelict site and remote-seeming despite its relative proximity to the town of Barnsley. It was accessed by road, but that was a by-road he thought owed its continuing existence to tradition, rather than need. No one came there and it did not look like anyone had for years.

Regardless of all this, getting over the gate looked an easier proposition than getting over the fence. That was only half the height of the gate, but offered little in the way of obvious hand and foot holds and was topped by a coil of rusted barbed wire. Fortescue could not remember whether he was due a tetanus booster jab. He was absolutely sure, though, that he didn’t want to find out whether he was or he wasn’t the hard way.

He was not, in truth, a very physical person. He could negotiate kerbs and other natural hazards when he walked around and he had passed his driving test at the second attempt but he would have been the first to admit that he was not action hero material. The gate was a formidable obstacle for him and beyond that, he could see the blocked-up south shaft, under a gaunt and frankly daunting tower of cold-riveted cast iron that had once housed a pulley.

If the gate was formidable, the shaft itself was terrifying. They had sunk it to a depth of only fifteen metres, but there was an iron plate welded over the entrance he would have to get through and old industrial sites were not playgrounds. They were full of hazards that were heavy and jagged and filthy and sharp.

The thing was that he really felt he had no choice. He was honour bound to help Edith Chambers. He had made her a promise and did not make them lightly or ever knowingly break one.

Then there was his curiosity. A fascination with the maritime past had made him a nautical historian. He thought he might be on the brink of discovering an important document that would shed light on a murky trade. It wasn’t just a document, it was a source. It was a first-hand account that would likely prove as genuinely compelling as any memoir he had ever read.

Finally, there was fate. He really did believe he was fulfilling a duty made inevitably on the memorable day he tried to inventory the contents of Seamus Ballantyne’s sea chest. If that moment had not occurred, he would never have come to believe in ghosts. But it had and he did. And he trusted that the ghost indirectly responsible for luring him to this place, had done so for a reason both important and urgent.

He was resigned to getting dirty. He thought that he might emerge from this experience bruised and grazed and would quite likely sustain the odd cut. Philip Fortescue tried not to think about the possibility of becoming trapped. The risk was there. Obviously it was. He was venturing underground and had told no one where he intended to go or what he intended to do. But there was no point dwelling on that, was there?

It took him forever, in his own mind, to clamber over the gate. He hadn’t climbed since childhood and had not done all that much of it then. His arms seemed much less strong now and his body seemed to weigh much more so that he could not haul himself up with his hands as he had as a kid. He had to find secure purchase for his feet to ascend. It was like climbing a ladder with no rungs and it was hard.

He got stuck at the top. One of his belt loops snagged on the tip of one of the gate’s vertical bars and it took him ages to free himself; anxious moments in which he thought a police car might hove into view and a couple of patrolling officers park up and observe his ridiculous plight with amused expressions through their windscreen. But the patrol car didn’t come and eventually he shrugged himself loose and over, scrambling and then falling the last few feet onto a carpet of coal dust still gleaming on the ground, crystalline after the morning’s rain.

There was a gap where the iron hatch met the lip of the shaft. Soil erosion or subsidence had created it. He looked through it and saw beneath him iron rungs hammered into the shaft wall descending into blackness and remembered that he didn’t have a torch or a rope or a whistle to signal alarm or anything else that even a schoolboy would have equipped himself with for a mission as hazardous as this.

His eyes would adjust, he thought, squirming through the gap feet-first, holding the cold and slippery edge of the hatch and committing the weight of his legs to one of the rungs. His eyes would adjust, because they would have to. He’d be blind down there otherwise and would find nothing.

Good sense or his instinct for self-preservation caused him to pause when he reached the bottom of the shaft. Before him would be what they called the gallery. And beyond that, was the tunnel which would dead-end at the point where the tunnel’s access to the seam had become exhausted. Gallery was a grand sounding name, but it was a space not tall enough for a man to stand upright in. And the tunnel would be very narrow. Men had hacked at the seam on their backs, prone rather than upright.

There was a reason for this. The smaller the dimensions of the tunnel, the less the risk of collapse, ran the theory. So at least Emma Foot had told him in his crash-course on early 19th century mining practice on the way to the Elsinore Pit.

He waited for his eyes to adjust. It was late afternoon. There was still plenty of light in the sky above the shaft. He just had to wait to become aware of the bit of it that penetrated this far through the gap he had squeezed through above him.

There was no water down there. At least, there was none around where he stood. He couldn’t hear it dripping. There were no puddles. This was both good and bad. A dry atmosphere was encouraging for the survival of a document written on paper or parchment. But drainage meant sink holes or subsidence to enable any rain water penetrating the shaft to escape, which was very bad if he happened to blunder somewhere where there was no longer solid ground beneath his feet.

Methane was odourless. But he had no sense of anything harmful entering his lungs. He could smell only coal dust and the stale odour of undisturbed air signalling a century or more of abandonment.

Fortescue waited. He was in no hurry. He waited until his eyes adjusted to the scant light leaking into the shaft from the afternoon sky above. He hummed to himself. He hummed The Recruited Collier. And then he sang a bit of it. And then he stopped singing because it sounded as though someone was singing softly along with him and that was an unpleasant thought down there in the lonely darkness beneath the earth in a place far from home or safety or the kind of company he might welcome and not be made afraid by.

He was afraid. He was honest enough with himself to admit that. He thought that only a fool would be unafraid in such circumstances. But his eyes grew sensitive at last to the limited light and he was able to see quite clearly in a monochromatic sort of way both the contours of the gallery and its shrinking, after twenty feet or so, to the black maw of the tunnel proper.

He thought that he would find what he was looking for in the tunnel. It would not be lying there in the gallery on a handy shelf or in a presentation tray. Life was not supposed to be easy. Everything was a trial. Everything worthwhile was difficult to accomplish. He had been brought up by his mother to believe that and it was a good belief because it never left you open to disappointment.

He took off his jacket. It was warm under the earth. His hands were already filthy and one of them was sticky with blood from his wrestle with the gate-top where he thought from the throb of pain that he might have lost a fingernail. He got down on his hands and knees. He crawled like that towards the tunnel mouth.

It was not necessary to see in the tunnel. It wasn’t wide or high enough for him to lose his way in. He could feel the iron rails to either side of his hands and knees. The trolley wheels had worn them smooth as the trolley’s laden weight of coal was pulled back into the gallery by the men working behind the cutter at the face.

They had toiled through 18 hour shifts, sweating and grimy in their grim and hazardous work. But there was no sense now, of all that industrious toil. Two centuries of silence and absence has stilled the place utterly.

He crawled. He crawled for what seemed a long time until he was fully immersed in blackness and silence, the blackness so complete and silence so profound that only his sense of touch anchored him any longer to the earth.

And then he bumped up against the trolley itself and its wheels creaked stiffly with lack of lubrication on the rails. And when he reached with a hand there was some cargo contained within the trolley, wrapped in what felt under his fingers, like oilskin. And he gripped and in the cramped black space hefted the stiff flat rectangle of something written long ago and stored there in dark secrecy.

By the time they realised he was missing, the weather had deteriorated to an extent that made searching for James Carrick a practical impossibility. The wind rose and strengthened on their descent from the heights and the settlement. The cloud lowered and thickened and the rain began to needle into their faces. It scoured off the vast Atlantic, propelled by a chilly Westerly wind. They reached the encampment cold and wet and tired, a bedraggled bunch of people collectively dismayed by the atmosphere of the place they had left and collectively defeated by the raw, dwarfing fury of the elements.

That was Lucy’s impression, anyway. Kale and Cooper looked suddenly like their men-of-action images were far more cosmetic than real. Jane and Alice looked as pissed-off and soaked through as she felt herself. Even Lassiter looked like a man who’d welcome a blue lamp signalling his local station and a mug of cocoa made by his old desk sergeant with something akin to relief.

It took them well over an hour to get back over the boggy exposure of the island terrain and only Paul Napier and the priest seemed unmoved by the ferocious violence of the still-gathering storm.

They assumed Carrick was in his room until Lassiter rallied knowing it was his turn first on their roster to prepare their evening meal. When he was ready to serve it, Lucy went and knocked on Carrick’s door, cursing him as a lazy bastard for missing the inaugural trip to the settlement and snoozing on the job.

He wasn’t there. He had left his computer switched on. Lucy noticed his screensaver, a picture of a woman who wasn’t his wife pretending to read a book and smiling rather sardonically. She switched it off.

They could not find him in the compound. Lassiter asked her was it in character for him to wander off independently without leaving some indication of where he’d gone. She said she couldn’t imagine anyone less likely to do that than Carrick. He’d put on his McIntyre branded foul weather gear before climbing aboard the chopper confiding to her that it was his first practical encounter with Velcro. He was someone who thought of a round of golf as a wilderness experience.

Lassiter served up their food because if he hadn’t, it would have spoiled. Then without eating his own, the ex-policeman went and fetched Paul Napier from the security team’s camp. That was the moment, seeing the look on Lassiter’s face as he pulled on a cagoule with his own dinner plate untouched and ventured back into the storm to fetch Napier, that Lucy knew with a sick churn in her stomach that the disappearance was probably going to turn out to be serious.

It was just after eight by the time Lassiter returned with Napier and Davis, who seemed to be the security head’s nominal second-in-command. Everyone was assembled in the recreation suite. Everyone was asked by Lassiter when they’d last seen the man from the Chron. There was still over two hours of daylight left then, but the wind was so strong it was making the encampment buildings shudder and ripple with its force and the rain was a driven deluge and Lucy already had a very bad feeling.

Napier said the weather would prevent a proper search. The conditions were too severe. Visibility was poor and movement on foot around the island impractical and even dangerous. He said any search would be voluntary and of necessity, incomplete.

Then he went and fetched his man Walker. He told Walker and Kale and Cooper to sit tight and keep everyone together and remain vigilant. Then he volunteered himself and went out with Davis and Degrelle and Lassiter, who also volunteered, and they did all the looking they could practically do, searching in the obvious places and waving their flashlights and bellowing into the gale without response.

They had returned and reassembled in the recreation suite and darkness was falling when Lassiter, by now nursing a real cup of cocoa, asked Alice Lang would she touch something of Carrick’s to see if that could give them a lead.

Lucy took this to mean that the detective already suspected something really awful had happened to her department head. She offered to go and fetch something of Carrick’s from his room. She returned with his laptop and she switched it on and when the screen clarified Lassiter went very pale and Alice screamed a scream blood-curdling even against the wail of the storm outside.

‘He’s gone,’ she said simply, when she had composed herself.

To Lassiter, Lucy said, ‘Who’s the girl in the picture holding the book?’

‘Her name was Elizabeth Burrows,’ Lassiter said. ‘She stole something from the sea chest that used to belong to Seamus Ballantyne when she was a graduate student in Liverpool. She killed herself in 1971.’

Degrelle said, ‘And you believe those two events were linked?’

‘I had recent cause to inventory the contents of that sea chest myself. It wasn’t an experience I’d happily repeat.’

‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ Kale said.

‘All it means,’ Cooper said, ‘Is that Carrick had a rather morbid taste in screen-savers.’

‘Had?’ Jane Chambers said, ‘Past tense, Karl? Do you know something the rest of us don’t?’

He shot her a vindictive look, but did not reply.

‘I’m going to the communications room,’ Napier said. ‘I’m going to have to call this development in.’

‘Good luck getting any sort of a signal in this shit storm,’ Kale said.

‘I have to try. It’s my job. You should all try and do something positive before you turn in tonight. Anything; action is therapeutic.’

Jane said, ‘Have you needed to resort often to therapeutic tasks in the time you’ve been on the Island, Sergeant Napier? Has this assignment been particularly challenging for you and your men?’

Kale said, ‘If you do get through, Napier, ask them will they come and take me off. Assuming we get a window in the weather.’

Cooper said, ‘Are you serious, Jesse?’

‘That guy Blake disappears. Then Napier’s people find a rigid inflatable missing its passengers and crew. Now Carrick vanishes. I’m seeing a pattern here, Karl. I was enthusiastic about the expedition in theory. But there’s a word for the atmosphere in that settlement we toured this afternoon and that word is menacing. The threat was palpable. I believe every one of us felt it. And I’ve no interest in the kind of scholarly triumph that only comes posthumously.’

‘Everything will seem much more mundane again when we find Carrick, alive, well, wind-bedraggled and highly embarrassed at the fuss he’s unwittingly caused. Will you stay if we find him?’

‘Only if we find him alive,’ Kale said.

‘We’ll find Carrick,’ Cooper said. ‘Blake was a classic candidate for suicide. Boats are inherently hazardous in these waters. You wouldn’t want to be out in one now. No one would. But we’ll find Carrick, I’m sure. Anyway, you can’t leave. We’ve only just arrived. The expedition needs you.’

To Lassiter, Degrelle said, ‘I’d like you to tell me about your experience with that sea chest in Liverpool.’

‘Not now, Father. It’s already been a very long day,’ Lassiter said. He was looking at the seated Alice Lang and his face wore an expression of naked concern.

Jane Chambers said, ‘I think you should tell all of us about your encounter with the sea chest, Mr Lassiter. It doesn’t seem either fair or scrupulous to withhold that kind of information.’

‘You’re a virologist,’ Cooper said. ‘You believe in science, not spooks.’

‘I believe in empiricism,’ Jane said. ‘I have an open mind.’

The inference being that you don’t, Mr Cooper, Lucy thought, thinking good for you, Jane, but not really sure where this was all going. As if on cue, thunder boomed right above them. She shivered at the suddenness and loudness of the sound. ‘The book Liz Burrows is holding in that picture seems to be Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,’ she said. ‘Maybe we should all sit around and tell ghoulish stories, until dawn breaks.’

Kale said, ‘You’re the professional story teller, darling. The rest of us would be at a disadvantage.’

Lucy said, ‘We’re all at a disadvantage until Mr Lassiter tells us about his experience in Liverpool. Jane is right about that.’

‘Tell them, Patrick,’ Alice said. ‘I think they need to know.’

Jane said, ‘And then when you come back from sending your radio bulletin, Sergeant Napier, you can tell us all what it is about this island that’s made a tough man like you so mad keen on therapeutic tricks.’

Chapter Sixteen

Fortescue was filthy and afternoon had turned to early evening when he emerged from under the ground. His hair was caked in coal dust and his eyes rimed with it. His clothing was stiff with the stuff. He walked the distance to where he had parked his car with his package under his arm, completely oblivious to the people staring at him open mouthed on the pavements of Barnsley on the route.

In modern times the miners had showered after their shift. There was no one left living who remembered men looking like Philip Fortescue did now after a stint at the coal face.

But Fortescue did not think about that. All he thought about was the distance separating him from his flat in Formby. It was about 80 miles and around an hour and a half. It was a short jaunt and the blink of an eye, comparatively speaking. In the last couple of hours he had travelled 200 years back in time to reach something written in another world.

In some ways that world had been quite enlightened. But in other ways it had been quite deliberately dark. Children had manned the trapdoors in the mines meant to prevent the spread and build up of lethal methane gas during brutal shifts of work endured without a break.

That had not been the worst of it. Just how dark that period had been, he thought he would only discover truly when he unwrapped the journal carried now in oilcloth under his arm.

The giddy thought hit him that he might actually be carrying nothing to do with the ship’s doctor, Thomas Horan. He might just as well be carrying a cache of old newspapers or religious pamphlets. In theory the parcel under his arm could be anything from the period of the South shaft closure at the Elsinore Pit. It could be an inventory of workshop tools or a wages list of the men who had worked there. It could be a print run of election posters dumped by a lazy canvasser.

But it wasn’t, was it. Because he knew that when he had imagined someone singing The Recruited Collier along with him back down there in the darkness under the ground, at that moment when his bowels had threatened to turn to liquid and the sweat had frozen on his forehead, he had not been imagining anything at all. He hadn’t been required to imagine it. The two-part harmony had been sly and sardonic and real.

He would unwrap and read what he’d discovered as soon as he got home. He would not take it to the museum. Generally he did all his serious, scholarly reading at his desk at work in the spacious office he had to himself and which he could lock from the inside because some of the artefacts he handled were so rare and valuable.

In a sense this was a work related find. If he had never accepted his current post, he would not be carrying it now. He owed Edith Chambers’ original call to his position at the museum. He owed Emma Foot’s priceless cooperation to his professorial status and exalted job title. But the methodology of the search and the nature of the object he’d tracked down would always remain a secret.

His experiences since opening the sea chest in the museum basement had made of him a circumspect and superstitious man. He felt that he would be very unwise to try to profit in any way from what Jacob Parr had obliquely led him to. It was not his to profit from. He would derive no academic glory from his discovery. He would read it and then pass it on and he felt truthfully that even reading it was probably a risk he shouldn’t take.

He had to read it, though. He felt his courage under the ground had earned him that privilege. If he read it, its contents might haunt him for the remainder of his life. If he didn’t, his curiosity would certainly torment him for as long as he lived.

He might sit with it in his favourite chair and glance up and see Liz Burrows in her double-button coat under her black bob watching him from across his lounge with a look of mordant disapproval twisting that scarlet mouth.

But he felt that he probably wouldn’t. He had seen less and less of her over recent weeks. He suspected that she must have urgent business elsewhere; someone more deserving than him to haunt. He certainly hoped that she did. Even a glimpse of her unnerved him. Where her ghost was concerned, familiarity would never breed contempt.

Only dread, he said to himself. He looked at his wristwatch. The experts were well and truly on the island, now. They were preparing for their first night under canvas, or the hi-tech modern equivalent. He wondered how Lassiter and the rest were getting on. He liked Patsy Lassiter. He hoped Alice Lang was drawing a happy blank on New Hope with her dangerous psychic gift. He thought inevitably then of Jane Chambers.

He had reached his car. He opened the driver’s door and climbed in, dirtying the fabric of the seat and seat back, smearing both beyond hope of ever being made properly clean again and completely oblivious to the fact. His mind was on Jane as he put her daughter’s prize on the seat beside him. She would be out and about on the island, skipping through the gorse and shingle, clad in one of those padded orange anoraks.

He thought that she was probably the only woman in the world who could make Gore-Tex waterproofs and Timberland boots seem a sexy ensemble. He’d buy the paper in the morning and read the first story proper, see the pictures of their arrival as they exited their helicopters and got down to the business of nailing the New Hope mystery for good and all.

He thought of Seamus Ballantyne, staring bleakly into the distance, awaiting the speck of hope that was his bird while his community became ever more restive in their suffering in the settlement below. He hoped the journal on the seat beside his would be less elliptical than the account he had discovered written on the island, years later.

Patsy Lassiter had said Ballantyne’s bird was a carrier pigeon and Fortescue felt slightly deflated that he had not and never would have worked that one out for himself. He figured the journal written by Horan would be a much more straightforward read. Its contents would lie comfortably within his area of academic expertise. It was intended for Jane Chambers and she was a virologist, a clever woman but a doctor with no claim to the sort of arcane nautical knowledge he possessed.

He indulged the fantasy for a moment of going through it with her, perhaps clarifying its more obscure passages with cogent verbal notes of his own that she would appreciate as her respect and liking for him grew exponentially into something resembling real infatuation.

He sighed, letting this silly daydream go. Then he opened his car’s glove compartment and took out the SatNav and with grimy fingers, tapped in his home address. In the sunlit warmth of its interior, in the early evening sunshine, his car had begun to smell not just like coal, but like a coal mine smelled. It smelled dank and sour and rank and dirty and he didn’t notice this at all.

He switched the ignition on and reached for the radio’s power button and then abruptly changed his mind. Philip Fortescue was prepared to allow the long arm of coincidence to stretch only so far. He could not remember ever having heard The Recruited Collier played on Radio 2. But the station was far from immune to the charms of the Barnsley Nightingale. He had been brave enough for one day. He knew if he heard Kate Rusby launch into the song on the way back to Formby, he might lose not just composure but control of the wheel as well.

Two hours later, he was showered and seated in his favourite chair and had just watched a spoiler bulletin on the TV news about New Hope Island. For once, the station had an item of hard information to compete with what emerged daily on the pages of the Chronicle. A team from an American broadcast channel had been lost off the Hebrides. Their mayday distress signal — the last contact with them — had been made two miles from the west coast of New Hope itself.

They had completely vanished and 48 hours on were believed to be dead, the victims of a freak wave. There was speculation the wash from a super-tanker could have swamped their rigid inflatable. A helicopter search had proven fruitless and though contact with the island was, according to the coastguard sporadic, the expedition security chief, the decorated Afghan War veteran Sergeant Paul Napier MC, was adamant no bodies or wreckage had washed up there.

Fortescue shook his head. He felt a stab of sympathy for Alice Lang. If wreckage did wash up, they would hand a piece of it to her and she might close her eyes holding this fragment and hear the drowning cries of the crew and passengers as they struggled in the freezing water and thought wretchedly of the spouses and children they would never lay eyes on again. The more he thought about it, the more horrible an affliction her gift was and the more Patsy Lassiter had his work cut out taking care of her.

He unwrapped his oilskin package to reveal a stiff-backed book about a foot wide and fourteen inches high. The cover was marbled and the pages within edged in gold leaf. It was about an inch thick. Horan’s name was written in a bold hand on the flyleaf when he opened the volume, carefully, so that the stiffness of all the time it had spent closed would not crack the spine when he did so.

Being an account of the voyage of the Andromeda, it said on the title page; July 3rd to August 30th in the year of Our Lord, 1794.

Fortescue slipped on his glasses and licked his lips and began to read.

When Napier finished speaking, nobody said anything for a moment. They were still gathered in the recreation suite. His attempt to communicate Carrick’s disappearance to HQ in London had been a frustrating failure. They were completely isolated. None of the radio equipment functioned and no one could get an internet connection and the storm meant that for the present, they were stuck where they were.

The only recreation taking place was alcoholic. Lucy had raided their supplies for a couple of bottles of wine and two six-packs of beer. Everyone except Lassiter had accepted a glass or a can of something.

Cooper spoke first after Napier’s account. He said, ‘It doesn’t really amount to anything. A copper forced into early retirement by a drink problem gets spooked in a museum basement. An ex-soldier undone by battle trauma gets freaked out by a bit of dental enamel. Both of you could do with a dose of objectivity and a healthier perspective.’

‘So what’s happened to Carrick?’ Jane said. ‘I mean, what’s happened to him from your healthy perspective, Karl?’

Lucy said, ‘And who told you about Lassiter’s drinking?’

‘McIntyre did.’

‘You told me you didn’t know Alexander McIntyre.’

‘That was a little white lie.’

‘You denied it on the record.’

‘Nobody likes to be thought of as teacher’s pet.’

‘Deceit seems to come very naturally to you.’

‘I’m like the son he never had. You might want to bear that in mind, Lucy.’

‘You’re disregarding the word I saw written on the hearth when I went to the crofter’s cottage that day with Davis,’ Napier said.

‘If you saw it,’ Cooper said. ‘Davis didn’t see it. If it was there, it was a practical joke, done by one of your own boys, homesick and bored, trying to cheer a bleak situation up with a bit of ghostly mischief.’

‘I think it highly unlikely that Blake would have wrenched out one of his own incisors,’ Jane said. ‘The pain would have been extreme.’

‘He was a suicide,’ Cooper said. ‘Maybe he was a self-harmer, someone who despised himself. You’d have to despise yourself to take your own life. Anyway any other explanation is absurd.’

Kale turned to Alice. He said, ‘Earlier I called the atmosphere at the settlement menacing. I’m interested to know what you made of it.’

‘It didn’t suggest anything specific to me,’ Alice said. ‘The events there are too remote, I think. Beyond a feeling of desolation and gloom there was nothing. And as you remarked, I think we all felt quite similar there. It’s a sombre place.’

‘Except for Karl,’ Jane said. ‘Karl thought it was just like Alton Towers.’

‘Shut up,’ Cooper said. ‘If you can’t say anything positive, just keep your fucking trap shut, Jane.’

Napier said, ‘Why don’t you step outside with me, Mr Cooper? You need to learn good manners. I’ll teach you some.’

‘You’re not taking anyone outside,’ Lassiter said. ‘You’re going to behave professionally. We all are.’

Cooper grinned and pointed at Napier. ‘As soon as we re-establish radio contact, you’re fired,’ he said. ‘You’re history, soldier boy. You’ll be off this island and back in the Job Centre before you fucking know it. You have a great future, guarding the booze aisle at Sainsbury’s.’

‘I’ll hitch a ride out with you,’ Kale said, looking at Napier, ‘if that’s okay.’

Lucy said, ‘This expedition is in crisis. We’ve been here less than 24 hours and already we’re in meltdown.’

‘Our pretty little scribe, panicked into cliché,’ Cooper said.

‘It’ll make good copy,’ Kale said, ‘at least, it will if we ever re-establish contact with the outside world.’

‘We don’t need your waspish little one-liners,’ Lucy said. ‘What we do need is a viable plan of action on which we can all agree.’

Degrelle stood. He said, ‘I’m going to my room.’

‘I don’t think now is the time for sleep, Father,’ Lucy said.

‘I don’t intend to sleep,’ Degrelle said. ‘I intend to pray for James Carrick in the hope of his safe deliverance.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. There’s no need.’

‘Lucy’s right,’ Lassiter said. ‘We need to put our differences aside and agree on a crisis strategy.’

‘We can’t do anything until the storm abates,’ Napier said.

‘We can,’ Jane said. ‘We can stop arguing.’

‘That’s a bloody good idea,’ Cooper said. ‘I for one apologise for what I’ve said tonight. I mean that, folks. I’m sorry. We’re in this together, whatever it is. And we do need some strategic thinking.’

‘One, Napier keeps trying to re-establish radio contact with the mainland,’ Lassiter said. ‘Two, As soon as daylight returns and the storm dies down enough, in tandem with Napier’s team, I will co-ordinate a thorough search for James Carrick.’

There was a silence, a series of collective nods.

‘Is there anything else?’

Alice cleared her throat. She said, ‘In the morning, as soon as the weather calms, I intend to go to the cottage built and occupied by David Shanks. This is my idea and I do it voluntarily. But I’d like someone to come with me, if anyone’s prepared to.’

‘I’ll come,’ Lucy said. Then Jane said, ‘I’ll come too.’

Degrelle left the room. After he’d closed the door behind him, Lassiter said, ‘anyone else notice how subdued our famously obstreperous cleric has been since our arrival here?’

‘I don’t think he likes this place very much,’ Jane said.

‘Amen to that,’ Kale said. He emptied the dregs of his beer can down his throat and immediately reached for another.

McIntyre looked out at the view from the boat shed at the Ardanaiseig Hotel on Loch Awe. The loch was tranquil. Its surface was only ruffled occasionally by the odd salmon or trout swimming towards the lure of the evening light. From here he could see the mountains on the far bank rise high above their own tree lines to where the verdant green surrendered to patches of ochre and pale brown. The seaplane that had delivered him there floated on the loch on its pontoons, white and elegant, like a craft from a more serene and stylish time.

A hundred and fifty miles to the north-west, in the Hebrides, he knew that a great storm raged across the Atlantic. It had severed radio communication with his team of experts there. They had the pictures of their arrival on New Hope and the rather good piece penned by James Carrick that afternoon, but they had lost contact since it was sent and nobody could tell him when the lines of communication would be re-established.

He was not worried about the following day’s edition. Drip-feed was the successful way to build and maintain circulation with a story as compelling as this one was. They had enough material to make an impact in the morning. He was more concerned about his own growing suspicion that his people on New Hope faced dangers he had not really dreamt they ever would.

He knew now that his own presumption and prejudice had blinded him to the facts about the island. Shanks had not conjured the spectre of the little girl that had confronted and then teased and finally terrified him into leaving. And to call it a revenant, as Karl Cooper had, dismissed the threat it represented. Cooper had trivialised the thing Shanks had filmed because it had been in Cooper’s interest to do so. Cooper was a glory hunter, blind to any possibility but the one he sought to prove.

But Cooper was wrong about New Hope. McIntyre now believed that something ancient and malevolent had claimed the lives of the vanished community. It had turned on Seamus Ballantyne. It still possessed sufficient power to make mischief in the present day with those possessions the slave ship master had once owned. McIntyre should have set much more store by what Lassiter had discovered. Lassiter had integrity. Cooper’s glamour had blinded him to a vain man’s obvious failings.

Vanity had contaminated the whole project, when he considered it. He thought that Cooper and Jesse Kale and Jane Chambers and Degrelle had all signed up more to raise their already exultant public profiles than as sincere and genuine seekers after an answer to the mystery. There was such a thing as hubris, wasn’t there? He wondered what awful price they would be obliged to pay on New Hope for their conceit.

His conscience troubled him. He knew it would trouble him further if anything bad happened to Alice Lang, who had gone on the expedition out of nobler motives than some of her companions. He cared too about the fate of Lassiter and the security chief, Napier; men of principle who had gone along because they were on his payroll. And he cared about Lucy Church, plucky and talented and far too young and beautiful a woman to lose her life.

Was that a possibility? McIntyre thought that it was. No one had tried to settle on New Hope since Shanks. Shanks had been the beneficiary of a very narrow escape. He had gone on escaping, running all his life. But that life had been a blighted one after his experience on the island and according to Alice Lang, he had brought about its end deliberately. He had escaped. In doing so, he had never really got away.

A recent letter had provoked this train of thought. He had joked about the fate of Richard Blake to Lassiter. He’d believed at the time that Blake had probably walked deliberately into the sea. But that didn’t excuse the callous levity he’d demonstrated sipping tea on his sun terrace, jesting about Blake screaming only because the water was cold when he entered it.

He’d been sent the letter by Blake’s widow. There was a child too, only yet a toddler. He had responded with a generous cheque and some gracious words of condolence. But in masterminding the New Hope expedition, it had never occurred to him that he might be jeopardising lives. The certainty he now felt that he was, weighed dreadfully on him. He could not help but wonder what had made Blake utter that scream.

The hotel had always been a rich man’s refuge for him. It was in the Highlands and remote and the scenery had an epic grandeur that never failed to raise his spirits. He always stayed in the boat shed rather than the hotel building itself. The boat shed had been cleverly converted into accommodation that was more stylish than luxurious. He enjoyed the privacy and he honestly thought the view through the floor to ceiling windows unparalleled anywhere else in the world.

It was quite something to wake up to on a sunny summer morning when the loch shimmered and the trout leapt and the birds loudly sang.

It was twilight now. Sunset came very late in early June to this part of the world. But it had finally arrived. He was standing looking out over the loch from the boat shed balcony. Beneath him was the stone jetty alongside which they tied up the boats hotel guests would take out on fishing and sightseeing trips. He could hear the water lapping gently. Mercifully, this close to the water, there were no midges to torment him. He thought, out of the corner of his eye, he could see a tallish figure moving around down there.

This was curious because it was too late to take out a boat. McIntyre walked to his right to lean over the wooden rail and take a proper look. At first he assumed the figure on the jetty to be a member of the hotel staff. But she was not dressed right. She wore a black tailored coat that seemed heavy for the season and her hair was not tied back, the way the women on the hotel staff wore theirs for reasons of hygiene.

Hers was black and loose and worn in a longish bob. She turned and raised her head and looked at him and he saw that her lips were a vivid red before her frank gaze of appraisal became disconcerting and he backed away and went inside.

He thought about complaining to the manager about this intrusive hotel guest. Short of levering herself up from the ground to look in at him from the edge of the balcony, he didn’t think she could have done much more to breach the privacy he’d always enjoyed there.

Her stare had been rude and almost, he thought, hostile. He actually picked up the phone intending to call reception before telling himself that life was too short and a complaint would be petty as well as pointless. She would have wandered off by now.

There had been something familiar about the woman. It bothered him, this vague sense that he had seen her before or knew her from somewhere. He was on the point of sleep in bed an hour later before he remembered Lassiter’s account of his unnerving visit on his museum trip afterwards to a Liverpool pub. And he remembered the description Lassiter had given of the woman who had spoken to him there and he remembered, of course, who the woman had been.

Chapter Seventeen

July 3rd, 1794

Tomorrow we will barter for the able bodies of men using cloth and rum and flintlocks to make the trade. Tonight the captain is in excellent spirits as a consequence. The Atlantic was in a serene mood for most of our outward voyage and we made good time in our passage. We are high therefore on stored rations and low on the discontent afflicting crews when the sails are listless and the men are become bored in the doldrums.

We are tied up at a port in the Gulf of Guinea. War afflicts the West of Africa so constantly that the supply of slaves is ever bountiful. The winners of these conflicts seek to profit from victory by selling the men taken prisoner in battle. Any commander could see the logic of sending his foes into exile and being paid with guns to do so. Pity never intervenes in this ruthless commerce. The tribes are pure in blood and never intermingle and so the notion of common humanity is alien to the African Negro.

Last night I dined at the captain’s table. He is a charismatic man. He possesses a deep and mellifluous voice and is passing eloquent on every conceivable subject under the sun. He suggests much formal education in his erudition. But he claims this is contrary to the case.

He learned his seamanship and navigation skills at the naval college in Pompey. The rest, he says, comes from a gluttonous appetite for books allied to a prodigious memory. He says curiosity is the key to the accumulation of knowledge and he has always been fierce curious to know more about the physical world.

I told him about my own enthusiasm to know more about what lies beyond the coast of Africa. I confessed that I would like to venture into the hinterland within. He laughed uproariously at this and told me any such exploration would constitute a journey fatal for its taker. The tribes are territorial and merciless in their hostility to interlopers. You would be killed.

Capture would signal the same fate because captives are routinely sacrificed to their pagan Gods. The king ruling one country in West Africa will not trade a single slave with the white merchants, Captain Ballantyne told me. All of his war captives become victims of human sacrifice instead. This king is called Simonal. The land he rules is called Albache.

The Portuguese and the British have tried to persuade him. So have the Spanish and the Dutch. He will not be swayed concerning the fate of his prisoners. He believes he gains more from their blood than in barter for the white man’s manufactured goods.

The neighbouring kingdom of Dahomey, by contrast, sells almost all its captives as slaves and has grown enormously wealthy on the trade. Yet a European cannot travel in Dahomey either. To do so is forbidden and anyone defying this rule would pay for their disregard for the custom of the country with their life.

The captain has very strong opinions concerning religion. He confided in me on this very subject over our meal together last night. He does not differentiate between the cruelties of the Counter-Reformation in Papist Italy and the current barbarism of the Albacheian king. He says that worship of a Deity thrives on ignorance and that it amounts to no more than superstition dressed up in robes and rituals to appeal to gullible men.

He does not dismiss the possibility of a God. On the contrary, he says that the visible world makes a compelling argument for a creator. It is the conventions of religious belief he rails against. He says that they are arbitrary and a curtailment on the right of thinking men to speculate. He is a believer in science and scientific method and he argues that science would have made greater strides in discovery and progress were it not for such doctrinal concepts as blasphemy and heresy.

A God capable of creating the universe would not wish to be worshipped by man, says Captain Ballantyne. Vanity is a human failing. Why would an omnipotent being crave our fear or flattery or even be sincerely interested in our gratitude?

It is a good question. It is one to which I have no answer readily to hand. My own experience of medicine has led me on occasion to believe that God is a capricious and sometimes cruel being. But I have always believed that good as well as bad comes from divine belief. Christianity is a civilising force. The moral imperative is surely much stronger in the man who believes honestly in hell as well as in heaven.

Our dialogue became quite philosophical as the evening wore on and the wine flowed more freely. The captain has a great weakness for the metaphysical poets and for the plays of William Shakespeare. He is an authority on the recent revolution in France and the Terror that has followed it.

He believes that war between Britain and France is inevitable and that the victorious nation will determine the character of the new century. He told me the names of the politicians and the painters and the mercantile figures likely to play the greatest roles in shaping the destiny of Europe. For he believes Britain will eventually prevail in the coming conflict.

I would say this about the captain of the Andromeda. It is an aspect of his character I would cite as his singular weakness. He has an almost overwhelming need to be right about matters. Their subject matter and even their significance in the scheme of things are less important to him than his being proven correct about them. He is dogmatic in the extreme. It is a childlike trait, this, but disturbing in a man of authority. And he possesses authority for he rules our ship absolutely.

We parted at the end of our dinner as friends. There is a hierarchy aboard a ship of course. But in so far as he is able to do so, I think Captain Ballantyne regards me as more close an equal to him than anyone else aboard. I find his company mostly genial and always thought provoking and he is almost by definition an entertaining companion. But I would not wish to cross him and by doing so stimulate the anger that I believe lies deep within his true nature.

It does not rage, this anger. It does not boil within him for he governs his temperament coolly and with deliberate care. But it almost led to the death of a man when Jacob Parr was recently flogged for his second offence of drunkenness aboard.

The lash was used severely. I feared for a time that Parr’s flayed back would never properly heal and that he would perish in the brig from septic shock. You do not provoke the captain. You do not do so if you are a sensible and cautious individual.

Lastly, as he extinguished the lamps and corked only through fastidious habit a brandy bottle we had together emptied, I asked him why an indifferent God would bother to create men, if holding us only in contempt.

‘For sport,’ the captain said, grinning through the darkness of his cabin.

July 7th, 1794

Our living cargo procured, we cast off this morning for the West Indies. I watched them shuffle aboard empty-eyed in their iron manacles. They know nothing of their destination because no slave has ever been freed to return. And some would say that cutting cane on a sugar plantation in Jamaica is a happier fate than being disembowelled in honour of a pagan God.

But these were once proud warriors and it seems to me that they have lost everything that made life a worthwhile pursuit. Their freedom and dignity is gone. They have been physically wrenched forever from their homes and their families. They have surrendered their status in the world. They are and will always now be slaves.

The sailors who man the vessels plying the triangular trade almost never speak about the experience of having human cattle in the hold. They do not speak about the reek of despair that rises like a miasma or the toll of dead thrown daily overboard or the diseases that rage among the packed sufferers below decks as the vomit cakes them and the flies feast and the chafing from their manacles turns raw and their sores weep and fester.

What good would it honestly do to dwell on all this? There is no seagoing venture so profitable and the stories, if they gained currency, would be coin the abolitionists would happily mint and spend freely in parliament and on the stump and even in the pulpit in their attempt to see this inhuman business outlawed.

I cannot see such an ambition becoming successful in my lifetime because there is too much profit at stake and most of it enjoyed by titled and influential men. But such stories would make the seafarers involved seem cruel. Not wishing to be perceived thus, they remain tight-lipped about what they see. And the weak-stomached among them simply retch drily when the need arises and turn a blind eye aboard the ship.

Our miserable cargo comprises Albacheian warriors captured in the latest war by the armies of Dahomey. The prosperity of the latter kingdom means they have flintlocks and so are vastly superior in firepower to their enemy. Thus there was no disgrace in defeat for these men. They are physically splendid specimens; tall and strong and sturdy, at least when they came aboard, despite their shared demeanour of wretched despair.

One among them claimed my particular attention. This was because he stood in such stark and obvious contrast to his fellows. He was smaller than they were by a head and did not share their common muscularity. He was almost girlish in aspect and I thought might be from a different tribe entirely. But that could not have been the case for the others would have killed him in the common cages they share prior to being haggled over by the slave masters on the shore.

As he passed me I studied him and saw that his skin had been elaborately inked in a design I can only describe as exquisitely done. His neck and slender bared shoulders were filigreed with blue and purple and yellow detail. There were characters and geometric shapes of which I have never in my life before seen the like.

He looked me in the eye. They never do this. They are confused and defeated by their awful plight. And yet he looked me in the eye and the look was insolently appraising. And then to my astonishment he grinned at me and I saw that his teeth had been filed into points and coloured too. They are a vivid crimson. And then he was past me, shuffled like the rest of his fellows into the packed and airless hold of this unhappy vessel.

I confess I wondered what nature of man he might be. He does not look like a warrior. He is too slight to hurl the spear or wield the honed hardwood sword with which his fellow tribesmen fight in battle. It occurred to me that he might find more comfort than they will in the hold. But that is a naïve speculation. Despite his size, or because of it, his fellow slaves will be pressed hard against him down there in the closed and sweltering darkness.

There is something lizard-like about this man. It is an accumulation of impressions. It is the slender stillness of him and the pointed teeth and the scales etched onto his shaded skin and something dead and implacable in his stare. He is disconcerting. I am curious about him.

July 15th, 1794

I owe my position aboard the Andromeda to my cousin, Rebecca Browning. Though she married Captain Ballantyne five years ago, I still think of her in my mind always by her maiden name. I believe the marriage happy. She possesses a fierce intellect for a woman. They are friends and companions as well as lovers, I think. But she will always be Browning and never Ballantyne to me. That was true before and is truer now that I have seen how coldly ruthless the captain can be in what he believes to be the correct performance of his duties.

There is an infection among the slaves. I have my own theories about the communication of disease. Heat and close proximity engender it and it thrives on human despair and all of these elements are strongly present in our hold.

Six men had died this morning. The six corpses lay manacled and stiff, among perhaps another four or five who were sick, visibly suffering symptoms of the ailment that had killed their fellows. They lay in a row of 20 chained together in their section of the hold towards the bow of the Andromeda.

After a short discussion with the vice-captain and first-mate, Ballantyne armed half a dozen of the crew with flintlocks. Then the entire row of twenty were unchained and brought up onto the main deck and at gunpoint pushed over the gunwale into the sea.

The dead and the ailing and the well went into the sea together. I protested, as discretely as I was able to, to Captain Ballantyne. He looked mildly surprised at the rebuke and then a shadow crossed his features and he told me that it is his obligation to deliver as much of his cargo healthy and intact as he is capable. He was merely isolating the infection. He was doing what a veterinarian would do treating an outbreak of disease among cattle. And he would not brook my interference in the matter and that my comments were not only unwelcome, but insubordinate.

This short dialogue took place as we progressed and the screams of the live and still healthy men drowning in the water faded in our wake. It became clear to me in that moment that the captain does not at all regard the poor creatures in the hold as human beings. Of course he does not, I concluded in that moment. If he did, his task in commanding this vessel would in all conscience be intolerable.

Philip Fortescue had to stop reading. This was not because he was shocked by the detail of Horan’s account. He knew about the specifics of the slave trade in its peak years and so he knew that the brutality shown by Ballantyne was nothing out of the ordinary.

He had to stop, because the exertions of an unusual day had left him utterly exhausted. He supposed his ordeal at the Elsinore Pit had cost him energy and adrenaline. He ached and throbbed and could barely keep his eyes open. He thought what he was reading was interesting and intriguing but he knew that he had to sleep. He was struggling just to bring the words on the page into focus.

He was not just reading the journal. He was transcribing Horan’s arcane 18th century prose into modern English on his laptop as he went. He thought that it would be easier for Jane Chambers to understand if he did that. And he was making his own observations as he went along with notebook and pen. Some of the stuff he had read already seemed significant and even ominous.

He had to stop because he had reached the point where fatigue prevented proper concentration. Anything he read now, if he forced himself to press on, would be stuff he would have no memory of reading in the morning. He felt almost drunk on tiredness. His day had been remarkable and arduous and now seemed very long.

He closed the journal and yawned and stood and stretched. The gloomy thought occurred to him that the womanising cosmologist Karl Cooper was on New Hope Island with Jane Chambers. He vaguely remembered reading about their on-off romantic involvement. Somewhat pathetically, he had bought an issue of Heat magazine he’d seen at a supermarket checkout because she was pictured on the cover and he had learned about their liaison there. Oh, well, Phil my lad, lap of the gods.

He would set his alarm for 5am. That was two hours earlier than he usually got up for work. He thought it would give him plenty of time to polish off the rest of Horan’s clandestine account. Now, though, he had an urgent need to embody the cliché about being asleep before his head hit the pillow.

The storm had blown itself out by the time the expedition members gathered early the following morning in the compound galley for breakfast. There was a change in Jesse Kale’s demeanour Patrick Lassiter noticed immediately.

‘Reckon you can spare me this morning?’

Lassiter thought about this. Napier had been up for an hour already having no success trying to establish radio contact with the outside world. His man Walker, who had some wireless experience, would take over in the comms room so that Napier could join the search for Carrick. The logic of this was that Napier knew the ground better than anyone else on the island. There would be seven security men, himself, Cooper and if needed, Degrelle comprising the search party. Its numerical strength was more than sufficient. It was his private belief anyway that they would find no one. At least, they would find no one alive.

‘I can spare you, Kale. What do you have in mind?’

‘I slept on what the security guy said about keeping busy. When we walked back from the settlement yesterday, I studied the ground.’

Lassiter nodded. Generally the perimeter and the shingle was the surest way to cover any distance on the Island. But the storm had created a swell that made the breaking waves huge and potentially too dangerous to risk the shore. They had trekked home by the inland route.

‘Most of the topology is thin soil over granite,’ Kale said. ‘But there is an area of bog we passed a mile to the north-west.’

Lassiter thought he knew what was coming.

‘That’s where I would bury the victims in the event of a mass catastrophe,’ Kale said. He sipped coffee. ‘Most other places on the island, you’d be excavating rock to create a deep enough grave. That’s hard work with hand tools.’

‘They didn’t shirk hard work.’

‘I still think the bog is the likeliest bet.’

‘It’s a peat bog,’ Lassiter said. ‘So we’re talking about well-preserved cadavers. And Jane Chambers told the Chronicle that if it was plague, the bacillus could still be virulent.’

‘I’ll take my chances,’ Kale said. ‘I’ve got to do something.’

The Chinook devoted to cargo rather than passengers had left them a Land Rover and a mechanical digger; a small contraption with a metal scoop and caterpillar tracks that operated by remote control. Kale could get the digger onto the back of the vehicle using a ramp. When he reached the spot he could get it off the same way and excavate using the console. Lassiter wondered whether he should be going alone.

‘I’m a big boy,’ Kale said, reading his thoughts. ‘Jane could tag along. But she’s committed to holding Alice Lang’s hand at the crofter’s cottage this morning. After what Napier said about that place last night, I don’t envy them their assignment. Frankly, I’d rather be digging for plague victims.’

‘Take a short-wave,’ Lassiter said.

‘They don’t work here. Not with any consistency.’

‘They work intermittently. It won’t do any harm to take one.’

Kale grinned. ‘I’m flattered by your concern,’ he said.

Some of this was bluster. But Lassiter was impressed by Kale’s nerve and by his decisiveness in seeking to re-establish order and composure by focussing on his personal area of expertise. ‘Do you believe in ghosts, Kale?’

The grin vanished. He said, ‘I wouldn’t dismiss what Sergeant Napier told us out of hand, the way that Cooper did last night. I don’t think what happened to you at the museum in Liverpool sounded much like the consequence of a hangover. I was there yesterday in the settlement and the atmosphere was bad, brother. But if there are ghosts, they were once people. Find the bodies and maybe we put the ghosts to rest.’

‘Maybe,’ Lassiter said.

Kale got up to go.

‘When will you leave for the site?’

‘Got to get some shit together, forensic overalls, camera, voice-recorder because I always keep a verbal log. I’ll take my bag with my trowel and brushes and temperature and depth gauges. As soon as I’ve changed and gathered the kit together I’ll set off.’

‘Take a thermos of something hot and a foil blanket. Keep your eyes open for any sighting of Carrick.’

‘I will.’

Lassiter stood. He shook Kale’s hand. Kale turned and exited the galley and he walked across to where Alice and Jane sat talking to Paul Napier. ‘Where’s Lucy?’

‘She’s popped outside for a cigarette,’ Napier said.

‘She smokes too much.’

‘We all have our weaknesses,’ Alice said.

Lassiter sat with them. He looked at his watch. He was impatient to begin the search for Carrick, but he had to wait for Napier’s boys to finish their breakfast and arrive. A search party comprising men with empty stomachs would lack the energy and alertness to find anything.

He was also worried about Alice. He feared for what she might encounter at the cottage in her mind. He was glad that Jane and Lucy had offered to go with her. But they couldn’t really diminish the ordeal of what she might see. To Napier, he said, ‘Still no joy with the radio?’

‘Walker’s on it. An hour of that wailing is enough for me, to be honest. More than enough; like listening to an infant banshee. It’s pretty creepy.’

Lucy had come back in. She sat down and Lassiter got a blast of her tobacco charred breath. She said, ‘The whole fucking island is creepy. Pardon my French.’

Napier chuckled. Lassiter did not think you needed a detective’s intuitive skills to see that the security head had the hots for the Chronicle’s star feature writer. He wondered was the attraction mutual.

He looked at Alice. If she was worried about her impending visit to the cottage she was hiding it pretty well. He didn’t know for sure how she felt about it because they hadn’t really discussed the matter. It was her idea. It was important to her. She was here, after all, for a reason.

They had slept in their separate rooms the previous night. The agreement to do so had been tacit and based on circumstance — professionalism, gossip, the compound’s thin walls and single beds — but he’d missed her badly. He’d got used very quickly to her presence beside him in the night. He’d waited a long time for her and he loved her deeply.

‘What time will you go there?’

She smiled at him. ‘The weather seems pretty benign today. We’ll take the scenic route along the coast. We’ll set off at about nine o’clock. We’ll probably be there by about a quarter to ten.’

‘Don’t you know enough already about David Shanks? He lived a miserable life and you’ve witnessed his miserable death. What more can there be?’

‘If I knew that, Patrick, I wouldn’t have to go. But I do have to go and you know very well I do.’

Chapter Eighteen

July 27th, 1794

Jacob Parr considers that he owes me his life. This is an accurate summation of the one salient fact linking us. He is a liar and a drunk, thoroughly disreputable and beyond hope of any improvement in character.

He enjoys his life. Therefore he believes he owes me a debt of gratitude for saving it. This makes him not just beholden but loyal to me. He is a man in whom, despite his dissolute habits, it would be safe for me to confide.

Today he confided in me. It is his daily task to give the slaves in the hold the dribbled water ration that is just enough to keep them alive as the ship reaches the warmer latitudes and they sweat and roast beneath us. Though it is forbidden, he swaps the odd word of banter and encouragement with those of them who speak a little English, he told me.

Among those with whom he has briefly exchanged words, is the tattooed lizard man I noticed coming aboard. Today Parr told me that this strange and exotic individual wishes to speak to me. He has learned somehow of the position I hold aboard the ship. He knows that I am a doctor. He told Parr that he too is a healer of sorts. It is almost impossible to imagine having any commonality with him. But he insists to Parr that what he wishes to speak to me about is a matter of the gravest importance.

July 29th, 1794

I have spoken to the Albacheian healer who calls himself Shaddeh. He has asked me to intercede on his behalf with Captain Ballantyne. He says he is capable of sorcery. He says that if he is not unchained and taken from the hold and treated as our honoured guest, he will visit great dread and anguish upon the captain.

He whispered these words to me. I crouched to hear him. His fellow slaves beside and beneath and above where he lay, heard none of it. They slumbered open-eyed as if in a hypnotic trance while he spoke. They were like that when I went to him at the appointed time. I heard them stir only when our talk concluded, as I reached the top of the companionway.

‘If you are capable of sorcery, then free yourself.’

‘I cannot,’ he said. ‘I cannot use the magic in that way.’

‘I do not believe in magic.’

‘That is your privilege. I am not so fortunate.’

‘So magic is a curse?’

‘It is a burden,’ he said. ‘But we have no time for your games of white reason. If the captain does not free me, his daughter will die.’

‘He has no daughter.’

‘But he will have. And she will die. And then the sight of her will haunt him but she will not be the same because the demon will inhabit her.’

I rose to go. ‘I will listen to no more of this blasphemous nonsense,’ I said. ‘Free yourself if you are capable of magic. Mouth the spell that will melt your bonds like sugar over the flame.’

His laughter followed me as I climbed up to the hatch. It was a rusty, gleeful chuckle. I might not believe in his magic. But he does, I am certain.

August 4th, 1794

He knows nothing of how or where he came to be born. He was found naked beside a stream one dawn by a hunting party as an infant child. In a bag sewn from snakeskin beside him were two bracelets of human teeth drilled through with silver chains.

He says he carried these adornments until adulthood, when he had earned the right to wear them. He says that they were given to Captain Ballantyne by his Dahomey captors in return for a small keg of rum.

The tribal elders taught him magic. He was gifted at it from the beginning, he says. I asked him what was the worst he could inflict on Captain Ballantyne and he treated me to that gleeful, rusty chuckle of his. It is a sound that can turn the blood in a Christian’s veins to ice.

‘I can inflict the loss of his daughter and bring her back in a way that will make him implore his God to take her from him again.’

‘The captain is a rational man. Such a threat would be meaningless to him.’

‘Yet I will carry it out. Tell him.’

‘That would not be wise.’

‘Tell him.’

‘What else can you do?’

‘I can achieve many things. I can heal. I can kill. I can make puppets afterwards of those who choose to take their own lives. I can breathe life into the Being that Hungers in the Darkness. Few can bring it. Fewer still can make it go away again. I can do these things.’

‘You speak in riddles.’

‘Your language has no words, doctor, for what I have been taught to accomplish.’

August 10th, 1794

Ballantyne knows about the threats made by the Albacheian sorcerer Shaddeh. Jacob Parr must have told him. Parr must have eavesdropped on our conversations and passed the content of them on to the captain. Thus does he seek to ingratiate himself with the martinet ruler of our little wood and canvas kingdom; thus does he seek to wheedle favour from the man who had him flogged twice half to death.

I do not understand Parr’s motive at all. But the consequence has been grave and bloody and immediate. Shaddeh was freed from his shackles at eight bells and hauled up onto the main deck and tied there to a chair. The captain announced the nature of his claims before the assembled crew.

And then he challenged the sorcerer if he could, to conjure some magic. Sailors are superstitious and there was a moment of uneasiness so strong it was almost tangible there under the fierce sunshine on the scrubbed deck. Shaddeh looked sinister and slight in his scaly skin, with his pointed teeth bared in a crimson snarl. But of course nothing happened and trepidation turned to scorn and then to ridicule as the crewmen began to laugh and jeer at him.

I noticed that the ship’s cook had gained the deck. I had never seen him before anywhere aboard but in the galley. He handed Ballantyne something that flashed in the sun and with a sudden sinking in the pit of my stomach I saw that it was a meat cleaver. In a couple of strides the captain stood before the sorcerer and with two swift downward strokes performed the mutilation that deprived him of his hands.

He made no sound. Even when the bucket of molten tar was bought to cauterise the bloody stumps, Shaddeh made no sound at all. The captain turned to the assembled crew. They stood and watched in silence as he waved the dripping cleaver. To Parr, he said, ‘Take the offal. Nail it below were the slaves can get the best view of it. Show them how the threats of a savage are received aboard the Andromeda.’

Shaddeh was taken below. I took to my cabin numbed by what I had seen. The savage on the deck was not the man tied by ropes to a chair. I pray this is a side of his nature my cousin Rebecca will never be shown by Ballantyne. He is not a civilised man. He is bestial in his fury. Yet he is more terrifying than any beast because he has absolute power aboard the ship. The men fear and respect and even revere him. Parr’s treacherous treatment of me is the living proof of that.

I fear for Rebecca. The sorcerer could do nothing to protect himself from the gruesome wrath of our captain. But I cannot help suspecting there is substance to the threats he makes. I fear for Rebecca and I fear for the daughter to whom she has not yet given birth.

I fear for the Albacheian too. I fancy the captain has more sport planned for this new and unexpected adversary. That can be the only reason he was not thrown over the side. Further pain and humiliation is planned for him I am sure.

His useful life is at an end. No one would employ a slave incapable of work. Ballantyne has turned him into a living contradiction. He will see I think an amusing irony in what he has accomplished.

Kale enjoyed driving the Land Rover open topped cross-country to the patch of peat bog he considered the ideal location for a mass grave. The storm of the night before had given way to blue sky and bright sunshine. The smell of the sea was so strong on the westerly wind that he could taste brine in the back of his throat. There was no radio in the vehicle and if there had been he knew there would be no reception. He hummed a medley of his favourite songs as he drove.

He felt quite buoyant. The visit to the settlement of the previous day had shaken and depressed him. He did not believe in ghosts; not really he didn’t. But he believed that certain places carried a residual trace of the bad things that had occurred there. The New Hope settlement was just such a spot. He didn’t need Alice Lang’s psychic talent to sense that something awful had occurred in that bleak, abandoned hamlet.

Now though, he felt good. He was doing something practical. His private theory about James Carrick was that the man had gone off to be by himself and got into difficulty when the storm descended. Carrick was terribly out of shape and had looked pretty sick even aboard the chopper. He was a man totally out of his depth in an environment as rugged as this.

Kale knew he would feel delighted and relieved if he stumbled on the lost man and thus found a use for the thermos and foil blanket Lassiter had suggested he bring. But he thought a night exposed to the wind and rain of a tempest in the Hebrides would kill stronger men than Carrick. Disoriented and having lost heart, he would have succumbed to hypothermia or been dragged by a rogue wave into the heaving seas to drown. More than twelve hours had passed since his disappearance. They were looking for a body.

He was looking for lots of bodies. He was confident even though aerial photography of the island had never shown anything anomalous. Mass graves often showed up in thermal imaging from above. That was because decomposition generated heat. But the heat of a peat bog grave was determined by the dense matter surrounding the corpses so the aerial studies didn’t work. He was quite excited at the prospect the day offered. Peat was an excellent preservative and any corpses he found would be ripe with clues as to the manner of their deaths.

He was there. He felt the texture of the ground change and the steering wheel shudder slightly in his grip as the heavy tread of the Land Rover tyres bit and churned at the yielding terrain. He switched off the ignition and climbed out. For a moment; only for a moment, Kale felt tiny and insignificant under the vaulted sky, in that wilderness of granite with its great waste of surrounding ocean. Then he gathered himself and unloaded his site kit and got the digger down the ramp and onto the soft, secretive earth.

He first took photographs of the virgin site. Should he be successful in finding something, these contour shots would demonstrate just how clever and intuitive he’d been because there was really nothing to signify anything unusual beneath the surface.

He marked out the area he wanted to excavate with tape running between evenly positioned stakes. The stakes were made of wood and penetrated only a few inches deep so would not compromise the site or hit and damage anything significant. Next he described what he had done so far into the Dictaphone he always carried. And then he used the digger to carefully strip the top layer of turf from an area of around fifty square feet.

The work was routine and repetitious and he thoroughly enjoyed losing himself in the completion of it. He prided himself on causing no unnecessary damage or upheaval to a site. He worked fastidiously and was scrupulously neat and always methodical. He scented the rich aroma of peat growing stronger as the turf was lifted in strips that were then carefully rolled at the edge of what would eventually become a dig.

He looked up because he noticed that the birds were no longer singing. The area around the peat bog had grown totally quiet. It had also grown very still. Wind had been a feature of the island since his arrival. Now it had died down completely. He thought this unusual for the Hebrides. He blinked and looked at his wristwatch and saw that two hours had elapsed since his arrival there.

He thought sombrely for a moment about those ancestors of his own who might lie beneath this black earth. He thought about the bleak obedience of their lives and about the bloody deaths they might have endured because of Ballantyne’s cruel and barbaric system of belief.

He would discover the truth. It was the real reason he had come. There would be a measurable benefit to his unravelling the enigma of the vanishing. There was far more to it for him that the kudos and notoriety the other expedition members sought.

His fame and his sexuality had become obstacles in his relationship with his family and with his father in particular. Daniel Kale was an austere and academically inclined man uncomfortable with both his son’s celebrity and his predilection for other men. When Kale solved the mystery of how their New Hope ancestors had died, his dad would see him in a completely different way. He would be grateful and impressed. The achievement would warm his cold heart, wouldn’t it? It would thaw their frozen feelings for one another.

After three hours of deliberate and dogged work on the site, he decided he would eat some lunch. His stomach was growling emptily. The temptation was to work on in a state of excitement, but he had to resist that. Frenetic was fine for those hit feature films in which Harrison Ford had made his occupation glamorous. It did not do for real life. Haste was amateurish and made you miss or overlook significant clues. He went and sat back in the Land Rover and took the sandwiches he had prepared in the compound galley that morning out of the glove compartment.

He poured a cup of Earl Grey tea from the flask he had brought for himself, rather than the one he had filled with Bovril and boiling water in the hope he should come across James Carrick. He sipped tea and bit into a sandwich filled with strong Scottish Cheddar and wished that he had a radio to listen to. It was impossible to sing, even difficult to hum, through a mouthful of bread and cheese.

The sun was strong overhead. Heat was drowsy through the windscreen. He thought he might snatch a short nap before continuing, once he had finished his lunch. He had turned in late the previous evening. They all had. He had done so after several more beers than he would normally consume. He did not feel exactly hungover. He felt good and positive. But he also felt a little bit sleepy and thought that a twenty minute power nap would give him an energy and alertness that was currently slightly lacking in him.

He woke up suddenly and completely disorientated. It had grown gloomy outside. The Land Rover’s roof was up; he could hear rain pattering gently on the canvas. It had become chilly and overcast and there was somebody sitting beside him. There was a strong smell of loam and something else he thought might be camphor or fish oil.

The person beside him was a little girl, ragged in a shawl, wind-bedraggled and smiling. Her teeth were a snarled jumble and her eyes no more than empty sockets, when he looked. She said, ‘I like games, Mr Kale. Will you play with me?’

Her voice sounded deep, dragged up reluctantly, from depths so small and ragged and frail a creature could not remotely begin to possess. Kale felt his crotch grow suddenly warm as he lost control of his bladder and pissed himself in terror.

August 17th, 1794

Our sorcerer is dying. His wounds have turned gangrenous and he has not much longer to suffer the indignity his life has become. The whole ship knows it. The crew see the fact of the fatal infection as their captain’s vindication. Fate favours us and God is on our side and there is nothing evil or corrupt about the trade we prosper in. The weather grows more clement every day. We approach the West Indies where we will barter those that still live among our cargo for sugar and molasses and tobacco.

I have asked the captain for permission to talk to Shaddeh one last time. I am convinced he believes profoundly in his talent for magic. This has made me very curious about his history and character. I wish to know what formed and informed the man dying in the hold. Sometimes he is in the grip of delirium, like an opium eater, Parr jokes, with his rotten-toothed grin. But sometimes he is sensible to what is said to him.

To my astonishment, the captain has said yes to my request. I do not know why he has relented in this way. He has shown not an ounce of regret or remorse at what he did to the man. His reasoning is that he reacted to a personal threat. The Albacheian attempted to blackmail him. His response was swift and severe but fully justified. Parr would have told other members of the crew about the threats emanating from the hold. Such stories spread rapidly aboard a ship. Had he not acted, the captain would have seemed weak and indecisive.

I do not take issue with this rationale. I keep my own counsel. I wish to speak once more with the sorcerer before death deprives me forever of his secrets. I could pick holes all day in the captain’s argument. I could grow bored listing its contradictions. I will say nothing, though, because I want to know more about the man from the dark interior of the continent forbidden us by its natives. I hope to have my curiosity at least partially satisfied.

August 18th, 1794

‘Does life end with death?’ I asked him.

‘That is not a question I can answer. We have very different ideas about what constitutes a death, Doctor Horan.’

‘Where did you learn our language?’

‘Mostly I learned it from a priest.’

‘I did not know our priests were allowed beyond your country’s borders.’

‘He was a priest intent on sainthood, I think. He certainly achieved martyrdom.’

His joke provoked in him a rasping chuckle that became a short coughing fit. His fetid breath filled the cramped space we occupied, he in his chains, me hunched beside him, his brothers in bondage enduring the hypnotic sleep he still seemed able to inflict on them at will. The stink of his rotting flesh was fearful. Flies were soporific around him. They had no cause for urgency around their supine human meal.

‘You are a man of considerable intellect, I think. Yet you persist in this stubborn belief in magic. It is a contradiction.’

‘Your captain delivered me into bondage. He stole from me. He has maimed and murdered me. Yet if I could I would lift the curses I have placed on him. But I cannot. I have neither the time nor the strength. His daughter will perish a child and she will return to him a demon and the Being that Hungers in the Darkness is born now and will seek out and find him eventually.’

‘You are convinced,’ I said.

‘I know, Doctor Horan. I have recited the spells. I have incanted the rituals.’

His voice was a whisper. He was weak and seemed very close now to the conclusion of his life.

‘What is this Being that Hungers in Darkness?’

‘It is a feeling given form. It is spite made flesh. It will seek out your captain and find and devour him.’

‘Can it be stopped?’

‘Not by me. Not now. I am too weak.’

‘You believe in what you are saying. You are convinced of it.’

‘As will you be, Doctor, should you remain in your captain’s service.’

There was no point in arguing against his malevolent faith. It was obdurately held and his life was ebbing away. I asked him about the country in which he had lived before his capture. I asked him about its customs and values and laws. He answered patiently and in detail and I think that doing so diverted him from his physical suffering for the hour we spent together there. Then he told me something he said it might be vital for me to know. He asked did I have pen and paper and I produced paper and a pencil stub and he made me write this item of information down.

He died a short time later. I was only certain that he had expired when his spell cast on them weakened with his passing and his shackled neighbours began to stir and waken around him with confused shivers and groans.

I went to fetch Parr then, to send him for the key that would release my dead acquaintance from his chains. I would sacrifice a bed-sheet as a winding shroud, I decided, so that he would not suffer the humiliation of going naked into the sea. He had suffered more indignities than a noble man should endure in his time on earth.

Thus did the strangest association of my own short life, conclude. In doing so it left me with a strong and willing conviction. I would never serve again aboard a vessel plying that desperate trade. I would quit the company’s service as soon as we reached Liverpool. I would take no share of the bounty either. I would not have the blood of Shaddeh on my conscience or my hands.

Chapter Nineteen

They reached the cottage a little later than Alice had suggested to Lassiter they would. Jane thought this was partially because of the weather. The effect it had on the coastal stretches of the island was quite startling. The sea was transformed into an emerald tumble of whitecaps and the shingle was a glittering, multi-coloured display of stone. Kelp gleamed wetly at the tide line and the horizon was vast. It was beautiful, magical seeming rather than downcast and threatening as the settlement had been the previous grey and poisonous seeming afternoon.

Their lateness in arriving was also a consequence of how well the three of them got on. Lucy treated them on the route to a sort of stream of consciousness portrait of the men on the expedition. Alice and Jane found themselves frequently having to stop to wipe tears of mirth from their eyes.

This was partially hysteria, Jane knew. They had been collectively unnerved at the settlement. They’d been alarmed and upset afterwards by the disappearance of Carrick. They remained concerned about him, none of them more so than Lucy, who was his colleague. And they were not exactly looking forward to the psychic experience to come at the crofter’s cottage.

The cottage looked almost picturesque in the sunshine, against the shimmering backdrop of the sea. They had all three the previous evening heard Napier talk about his experiences there. But its whitewashed walls looked sturdily normal and surprisingly few of its roof slates were missing.

It didn’t seem sinister in the ominous way the buildings in the empty settlement did. It looked like it could be spruced up and made habitable again in no time. Give it some chintzy curtains and a brightly painted new door and it would appear quite cosy, Jane thought. Then she remembered the story of David Shanks, the tough recluse obliged to flee the home he’d built, so fearful he never returned to it.

They went in.

Its interior was not the wholesome refuge suggested by seeing the cottage from the outside. Its stone flagged floor was stark and the windows allowed in less light than Jane thought plausible given how bright a day it was. It was chilly in there too. The hearth was cold with neglect and the two surviving armchairs sagged bleakly angled towards the centre of the single room in which they stood.

She looked at Alice, who looked pale. Alice returned the look and then said to both of them, ‘I’ve always thought of this so-called gift of mine as an unwelcome intrusion into my life. I came here because I thought it might find some useful application in solving the mystery. If murder was committed here, I’d like closure for the victims. But I can’t dictate what happens when I see things. If it’s upsetting for you, I’m sorry. I’m sincerely grateful to you two for coming.’

Lucy said, ‘What are you going to do?’

Alice smiled. She was so pale that her skin seemed almost translucent in the feeble cottage light. Jane thought her incredibly brave. She could feel her own heart thumping in her chest. The goose-bumps were crawling across her skin the way they had that day at the school when she had been told about Edie and the folk song. That seemed a hundred years ago and this was infinitely worse.

‘I’m going to sit in Shanks’ chair,’ Alice said.

Lucy said, ‘There are two chairs.’

‘Only one of them is a rocking chair,’ Alice said. ‘That was the one he favoured.’

There was no point asking her how she knew this. She saw things. It was obvious to Jane from the certainty in her voice that the cottage was already painting pictures from its past on the psychic’s mind. It occurred to her that Alice Lang did not own her gift. When it came, it possessed her.

Alice walked across the room and sat in the chair. She placed her hands palms down on the arm rests, in patches where the varnish had worn away, as the original occupant of the cottage must have done. She closed her eyes and rocked deliberately and slowly back and forth. Her mouth was set and there was a single vertical furrow of concentration creasing her brow. She doesn’t do Botox, Jane thought, giddily. Good for her. Then again, she doesn’t have a TV career to try to sustain.

Her breathing seemed to deepen and regulate to something approaching the way people breathe when asleep. Her eyes opened abruptly. The lids snapped back and her gaze focussed firmly on nothing at all. Alice Lang had pale blue eyes but by some trick of light and colouration in the cottage, to Jane they now appeared a flinty shade of grey. Her whole face looked different. The angles were sharper and the mouth stretched into a hard sneer, the previously full lips suddenly thin and bloodless. The hands gripping the arm rests of the chair were gnarled, tipped with tortoiseshell nails, the index and second finger of the right hand burnished to a dark brown by nicotine.

Lucy visibly jumped beside her when the psychic spoke and Jane thought she might scream. The voice did not belong to Alice. It was deep and male and marked by a clipped enunciation far more common in the first half of the previous century.

‘Get off the island,’ it said. ‘You’ve very little time. Ballantyne’s gal is abroad. You wouldn’t wish to encounter that little bitch.’

‘What happened to Blake?’ Lucy said. ‘Where’s Carrick?’

‘You have no time to tarry asking questions, dear.’

‘Where are they?’

‘Consumed,’ Shanks said. ‘Like the queer.’

Jane said, ‘By Ballantyne’s girl?’

Laughter greeted the question. A bark of mirth from the officer’s mess in about 1917, Jane thought, wondering with growing dread would Alice ever make it back to them. There was an aroma in the cottage now; a cocktail of smells. It was a mingling of brilliantine and paraffin and wet wool and coal soot. There was too a hint of harsh tobacco. She wondered whether they any longer occupied the present in that place.

‘You know nothing, do you?’ Shanks said. ‘You women have come here knowing absolutely nothing. There is bad magic here, powerful Ju Ju. You should have stayed away.’

Lucy said, ‘Did you bring it here?’

‘Don’t be impertinent. There is a monster here. It grows all the time in strength. It cannot be stopped or appeased. Take it from one who tried and failed to stop it. Escape while you still have the chance.’

Lucy said, ‘Why have we not seen it?’

Shanks chuckled, drily. ‘You’ll see it, if you stay. Mark my words, young lady. When that moment comes, I fancy it will be the last thing you do see.’

‘You survived it.’

He chuckled again. ‘After a fashion,’ he said.

‘How did you manage it?’

‘You ask a lot of questions. All of them are immaterial. You are wasting time you do not have to spend on what is not relevant to the peril you face. Have you no inkling of how blighted this place is? Have you no sense of dread here? Are you so bloody stupid?’

‘What kind of monster?’ Jane said. ‘Are you talking metaphorically?’

Shanks sighed and the sound was the soughing of wind through a stiff, autumnal wood and Jane was aware that they were listening to the voice of a man long dead, hauled back into being only to warn them of the mortal danger they were in. She felt embarrassed at the question she had just asked of him. She swallowed, emptily, with the shock of what was being said to them. Her hands clenched whitely into fists. The monster of which he spoke to them was real, wasn’t it?

‘It is hell’s work,’ Shanks said, wearily. ‘It is an abomination. It is alert and cunning and hungry. Leave now, please, while there remains what little opportunity you have.’

His last sentence diminished in volume, trailing off as though Shanks was escaping himself. Alice’s eyes closed and her features regained themselves. Jane and Lucy watched while she slumbered for a few minutes and the sounds of the exterior world returned to where they were.

They became aware of the crash of surf and the shrieking of gulls in the sky above. The short-wave Lassiter had insisted they bring squawked once, uselessly in Lucy’s hand. They let Alice rest for a while, until the wait became intolerable to their fraught nerves and then they shook her awake and half-carried her out into the glaring light of the day. Jane looked back at the cottage from the beach already believing what she knew had just taken place impossible.

‘What happened?’

‘You turned into him,’ Lucy said, ‘into Shanks, like a medium. He spoke through you.’ She was struggling with shaking fingers to light a cigarette.

‘That’s never happened before,’ Alice said. ‘I’m not a medium. I just see things from the past.’

‘Maybe Shanks didn’t want you to see those things,’ Jane said. ‘They might have been unbearable to watch.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He warned there’s a monster on the island,’ Lucy said. ‘It killed Blake and James Carrick.’ She had her Zippo in her hand. She tried to ignite it and it squirted out of her grip onto the ground. ‘Fuck.’

‘And Jesse Kale,’ Jane said. ‘Shanks didn’t mention him by name, but it was Kale I think he was talking about.’

‘I saw Kale only at breakfast,’ Alice said. ‘We all did, talking to Patrick Lassiter.’

‘We need to get back to the compound,’ Jane said. ‘Shanks didn’t come back just now to amuse himself. We’re none of us safe here.’

August 30th, 1794

Our captain has asked of me a favour. In doing so, he has explained to my why he allowed my request to talk to the dying sorcerer one final time. He wishes me to remain silent on the subject of the voyage when I speak to my cousin Rebecca on our return to Liverpool. He knows of course that we are close. He says that the specifics of our brutal passage are not fitting for the ears of a well-born lady.

He knows her well. She embodies his own theory that it is curiosity above all that causes intelligent people to become knowledgeable. She reads the work of Mary Wollstonecraft. More accurate to say she devours it. She has advanced ideas. And she is always intrigued to learn about experiences beyond those she has enjoyed for herself. She will ask me about the voyage. That much is certain. But I will not tell her about her husband’s foul crime. I would not have done so anyway.

He summoned me to dinner at his table in his cabin last night. And it was a summons for I would not have acquiesced to a mere invitation. Our relationship has cooled to a degree that would prevent it from ever regaining the warmth it once had. He begged for my discretion in the matter of the sorcerer’s death. And then when I had sworn to that, he confided in me an ambition beyond his professional obligations.

He and Rebecca are to try for a child. My cousin is almost 25 and therefore rather mature to be giving serious consideration to this course. The bearing and birth of a child are difficult once a woman is past the age of about 20. The process often gives rise to medical complications during the pregnancy and older mothers seldom produce sufficient milk. Yet I feel they will be successful. The Albacheian’s revenge cannot occur unless they are. They will have a child together, Ballantyne and Rebecca and I would wager all I own that the child will be a girl.

When I did not react in the obvious manner and raise a toast to their success in this ambition to further their family, Ballantyne did it himself, filling my glass from a fresh bottle in order to do so, full of apparent good cheer and optimism. Yet there was a hollow ring to his words in announcing the toast. He was a little like a poor actor unconvincing in a heroic role.

I felt sorry for him, then. My pity was truly roused. He is undeserving of it. But it was evoked nevertheless.

I find myself increasingly convinced that the Albacheian sorcerer possessed precisely the powers he claimed he did. I believe he cast the spells and I believe what he prophesied will come to pass. I believe it because he repented of his actions at the end of his life and then gave me the ritual that will undo the worst of what his magic will inflict. He did this in sorrow and fear and remorse on the reeking planks of what we both knew was his deathbed. He was beyond empty posturing. I saw the terror in his eyes at the thought of the train he has set in motion.

Before I left the captain’s table, I reminded him of what Parr had overheard in the hold and subsequently told him about. I reminded him of the threat made against him of the Being that Hungers in the Darkness.

He laughed it off, as I knew he would, but the humour did not reach his eyes.

‘Should events in your future life ever cause you to recall those words, Captain, contact me,’ I told him. ‘I might be able to help you and by God, if I am able to I will.’

He just nodded. He did not speak, my promise signalling the conclusion of the last proper conversation I ever hope to have to have with the man. But he knows, in his heart. The bluster has quite gone from him. There is a word for men with the demeanour Captain Seamus Ballantyne now has and that word, is haunted.

Below are the words that must be incanted when the ritual is performed. I write them phonetically, as the Lutherans wrote the bible liturgy once they had renounced Latin. It is an inexact science, this. But it is as close as I can get in my mother tongue to the sounds as told to me by the Albecheian. I hope never to have to recite them. Magic undermines everything my vocation and schooling have encouraged me to think is true. And I am not brave. Were I called upon to confront the being that hungers in the darkness, I think my courage might in that moment fail me.

Written in Truth,

Thomas Arthur Horan

Fortescue closed the journal. He did not share Horan’s vacillating faith concerning the subject of magic. He had encountered Ballantyne’s sea chest and its unquiet contents and he had encountered the ghost of Elizabeth Burrows and when he had read the Albecheian’s boast; I can make puppets afterwards of those who choose to take their own lives he had almost jumped out of his own skin in fright and recognition.

Shaddeh had accomplished what he’d threatened. In a sense, he was still doing it, because nothing he started had stopped or gone away.

Ballantyne’s bird had not arrived. He’d remembered Horan’s offer of help. Something had reminded him of it on New Hope Island and he’d begged for the ritual and for whatever reason, Horan hadn’t sent it. Unless he had and the bird had been shot down for the pot or ended up feeding a hungry sea eagle on its fraught route through the Hebridean skies.

That was what had likely happened. Horan had sent the words of the ritual, bound to the leg of the carrier pigeon and the missive had never reached its intended destination. And he had not been able to go himself because by that time he was living the clandestine lie of another man’s life in Barnsley.

Fortescue looked at his watch. It was 8.40am. On New Hope, Jesse Kale was loading a Land Rover on what was to be the last morning of his mortal life. Patrick Lassiter was leading a search party in the fruitless hunt for a missing senior journalist. Alice Lang was lacing on her hiking boots for the walk along the shingle that would take her and her two companions to the cottage built by the crofter, David Shanks. In his room in the expedition compound, a Belgian priest was on his knees, praying. The Keeper of Artefacts knew none of those things.

He called Edith Chambers’ school and explained who he was and waited for 15 minutes for her to be summoned to the phone.

She said, ‘You’ve taken your time.’

‘That’s gratitude.’

‘Was Jacob Parr telling the truth?’

‘For once in his life, yes, he was.’

‘So you found Horan’s account?’

‘I did.’

‘And it contains important information for my mum?’

‘It contains vital information, for all of them, Edith.’

The other end of the line was quiet. Then Edith said, ‘Their lives are at risk, aren’t they? They’re going to go the way of the New Hope settlers, if they haven’t already. Have you heard the news?’

‘Not this morning. I’ve been reading. What news?’

‘Radio contact with the island had been lost, apparently. There’s no internet either. The newspaper is saying it’s nothing to worry about and probably just because of a bad storm last night. But if they’re in trouble and they’ve got no radio they can’t send a mayday signal.’

‘You’ve thought this through.’

‘Course I bloody have. My mum’s on New Hope Island.’

‘What do you intend to do?’

‘The question is, what do you intend to do, Doctor Fortescue? I’m a kid, remember? You’re the one with the information they need.’ She hung up.

‘Ungrateful little cow,’ Fortescue said, to the burr of the dialling tone. But that wasn’t what he felt. What he felt was that he couldn’t really fault her logic. She was perky and intelligent but at 14, she was a child. It was why he had agreed to help her in the first place. He could do things she couldn’t. Right now, he didn’t know what to do. But the first part of any plan of action had to be calling into work to say he wouldn’t be there that day. He had other, more pressing obligations than research and cataloguing.

The phone rang before his hand could reach it.

‘It’s Edie Chambers.’

‘Hi, Edith.’

‘Please call me Edie.’

‘Okay.’

‘Look, I think you’ve done brilliantly. I think you’re really clever and kind. Amazingly so, actually, it’s just that I’ve been frantic about my mum.’

There was a snuffle on the line. Edith began to cry.

‘I’ll do anything I can, Edie,’ Fortescue heard himself say. ‘I’ll do everything I possibly can, I promise. I won’t rest until I’ve seen your mum and given her the message.’

‘Thank you.’

Now you’ve gone and done it Phil, he thought, ringing the museum’s number.

Chapter Twenty

They called off the search at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. By that time there was nowhere left to look. At 5 o’clock, Lassiter told Napier that he thought it odd that Jesse Kale had neither called in nor returned to the compound. He said this quietly. There were others present and he didn’t wish to stir unnecessary panic.

‘The walkie-talkies are unreliable,’ Napier said, speaking equally softly. ‘They’re good kit normally, but nothing requiring a signal or wavelength seems to work here with any dependability.’

Lassiter said, ‘How long does it take to identify a mass grave? That’s a rhetorical question by the way, Sergeant, because it doesn’t take very long at all. Not when you’re someone with Kale’s level of expertise. Recovery is the time consuming bit. He was only trying to establish that the bodies were there.’

‘He could have got carried away,’ Napier said, aware of the ambiguity of his words before he’d even completed the sentence. Carried away like Blake and Carrick were, he thought.

‘If he’d found anything, he’d have been back here boasting about it,’ Lassiter said, ‘and recruiting helpers to rig a shelter over the site. I’m concerned.’

The Chinook that had unloaded the Land Rover Kale had taken had also deposited a pair of quad bikes for the expedition’s use. Both of the men knew it. Lassiter glanced around.

They were in the galley, which most people seemed to prefer to the recreation room as a place to gather and socialise. It was as though the bickering of the previous evening had left a bad atmosphere there. He saw that everyone but Cooper and the priest were present. And Kale of course, he was absent too. A meeting had been called for six to discuss the events of the day. A quad bike could easily get to the peat bog and back in less than an hour.

‘I’ll go,’ Napier said.

Lassiter nodded. ‘Be careful, Paul,’ he said.

Napier felt quite relieved to get away for a bit. He thought the tension in the compound was growing all the time. The search had brought home to all its participants just how wild and barren and remote the island was. Their failure to find any trace of the man they were searching for was a frustrating blow to general morale.

The women had got back from the cottage shaken by whatever experience the three of them had shared. They looked scared, frankly. And he thought that Alice Lang had aged about five years since their shared banter at breakfast.

Nobody had really forgiven Karl Cooper his boorish digs at Jane Chambers of the previous evening. He had sulked his way through the search for Carrick, seemingly aware of this. Then against Napier’s tactful advice, he had gone off to the settlement on his own. They could hardly forbid him from doing so; the weather was benign and he was a grown man there to investigate a mystery, not to be chaperoned. All they could say to him was to make sure he was back for six and the meeting, which Patrick Lassiter duly did.

The priest was behaving oddly. Father Degrelle didn’t seem to Napier like the man he’d seen pulverising Karl Cooper verbally once on an edition of Question Time. He seemed withdrawn and preoccupied. Generally, on television and the radio, he was a galvanic advert for his faith. Since the chopper had touched down on the island, he’d become almost unrecognisable.

He hoped the meeting would clarify a few things. The main mission of the day had been the search and that had ended in failure. The experts were supposed to be there to solve a mystery, not to create more of them. It seemed callous to carry on without James Carrick but he supposed that was what they would do.

He was there. He could see Kale’s Land Rover in front of him as he crested a ridge and nursed the bike into the shallow vale where the peat bog lay below. He could smell the peat. Grass ruffled beneath him fingered by a slight breeze. The ground dulled when the sun slipped behind one of the small clouds dotting the sky.

There had been a couple of showers earlier in the day. Here there had been, anyway. He saw that the Land Rover’s canvas roof was up. The windows were rolled fully shut and the interior of the vehicle was invisible behind glass reflecting the scenery. He saw the neat turf rolls of Kale’s punctilious handiwork and the black exposure of peat under which the archaeologist thought bodies might lie.

Of Kale there was no sign at all. Napier switched off the ignition and climbed off the bike. It was very quiet there. He could hear the ticking of his engine as it cooled and the metal contracted. There was no birdsong. He approached the vehicle. He cupped his hands to either side of his head and stooped forward against the pane on the driver’s side so that he could peer in at the Land Rover’s interior.

He saw what he suddenly knew he’d been looking for and swallowed hard and recoiled. A white incisor lay on the fabric of the driver’s seat, its root a torn encirclement of bloodied gum.

He blinked and regulated his breathing and looked around. He was alone there. Kale was as absent as though he had been plucked right off the earth. He opened the driver’s door. There was a slight odour in the cabin that smelled to Napier like camphor and fish oil. It was vague, subtle. But it was there and it wasn’t a scent the archaeologist wore. Kale wore the brand of cologne he was paid to endorse. Or he had. He didn’t anymore, because he was dead.

Napier didn’t know what to do. It’s picking us off, he thought. He had to get back. They had to consolidate. He had to get his men out of their encampment and into the compound. They could bunk down there as well as guarding its perimeter, there was ample room and it was much less vulnerable structurally than their tents.

That begged the question, vulnerable to what? He didn’t know. Perhaps he would have some insight after the six o’clock meeting. He was only certain that Kale was dead and that for the time being, his death was a fact it was probably wisest to share only with Patrick Lassiter.

Fortescue drove. He’d bought the car he was driving because his brother, who’d sold it to him, had said it was a babe magnet. This had not proven to be the case. It was a 14 year old Fiat Coupe Turbo with a thirsty two litre engine. It was not the run-around he had driven to Barnsley but he was driving to Scotland now and whatever its faults, the Fiat was a mile-eater. It hadn’t lived up to his brother’s claims, not even once. But the leather bucket seats were comfortable on a long drive and it was powerful and extremely fast.

He was quite surprised that McIntyre had agreed to see him so readily. He’d first recounted his tale over the phone to the Chronicle’s editor, a man called Marsden. Marsden had said that there was only merit in his plan if he brought Edith Chambers along with him. But Marsden was seeing the whole thing as a sensationalist news story and Fortescue was seeing it as something else entirely. Eventually he lost his temper and demanded to speak to the man whose idea the expedition had originally been.

McIntyre called him back. He did so almost immediately. He was polite and attentive to what he was told. And then he asked a lot of questions Fortescue thought not strictly necessary or relevant about Lassiter’s visit to Liverpool. He asked about Fortescue’s own experience with Seamus Ballantyne’s sea chest. He asked about Elizabeth Burrows; about her physical appearance and the manner of her death and what an encounter with her apparition could possibly signify and whether it was a portent of personal danger. Eventually, the penny dropped.

‘You’ve seen her, haven’t you, Mr McIntyre?’

‘Last night.’

‘Quite glamorous, I’ve always thought, for a radical feminist.’

‘Dead people are not glamorous, Professor Fortescue. They are disconcerting. I took to my bed afraid.’

‘I don’t think she is a harbinger of death or anything like that. I think she’s prevented from resting in peace because she took something that didn’t belong to her. And she took her own life, which makes her a puppet of Horan’s sorcerer.’

‘David Shanks took something. And he killed himself too, according to Alice Lang. And he doesn’t pop up frightening people.’

‘He put the thing he had stolen back. Anyway, I don’t have all the answers, Mr McIntyre.’

‘And it wasn’t Horan’s sorcerer, Professor. In the end it was much more Ballantyne’s, would you not say?’

‘Will you help me to get to the island?’

‘Come here. Show me the journal. I want to read it for myself.’

‘I’m genuinely sorry to be bothering you like this.’

‘I’m enormously relieved that you’ve called, Fortescue. I’ve had a bad feeling about New Hope for weeks. I’ve ignored it because I’m a stubborn man and I was reluctant to appear foolish in the eyes of the world. I just hope the document you have in front of you is genuine. I hope its fate that’s put me in a hotel on Loch Awe in Scotland and not in some other part of the world where people gather to be rich together.’

‘Scott Fitzgerald.’

‘What?’

‘That phrase about gathering to be rich together is Nick Carraway’s in The Great Gatsby.’

‘Never read it. Get here as quickly as you can.’

Fortescue drove. He did not switch on his car radio. He didn’t wish to hear the mournful opening chords of The Recruited Collier insinuate their way into his personal space. Whatever lurked on New Hope Island, whatever Shaddeh had unleashed, was capable of mischief and of real malevolence. But there seemed to be something gleeful in the malice. Some of the tricks, like the one played on Lassiter with Ballantyne’s watch, seemed to have been played simply for amusement.

Between where the Sat-Nav told him the speed cameras lurked, he averaged 130 miles an hour. He thought they would get him at some point and that if he came out of this the penalty points would mean he would be cycling to work for the next six months. But he also thought if he came out of this, he would have a good case for asking Alexander McIntyre to pay any speeding fine he incurred.

He had a bad moment just beyond Carlisle, when he began to ponder on what McIntyre had said about Elizabeth Burrows. And what he had said himself. He should not have said she was glamorous. It trivialised her and was disrespectful. It ran counter to her pioneering student ideology. If she appeared in the seat beside his, fusty and grinning and dead, with her straw hair and facial skin restless with the inward toil of maggots, she would not be glamorous at all. He would lose control and leave the road and the Fiat, with its full petrol tank, would become his funeral pyre.

For several miles he drove expecting just such a visitation, his arms locked at the elbow and his hands clammy on the wheel and his eyes rooted to the road ahead of him. But it didn’t come.

Eventually the sheer, drear monotony of motorway driving re-imposed itself and he chastised himself in ripe thought-language for his own spineless cowardice. He was an odd choice for this sort of task, he knew. He was the only person who could have done what he had and the least well qualified he could imagine for what he was about to. If everything worked out, he would at least meet Jane Chambers. For the rest of the drive, he took what consolation he could in that prospect.

Cooper switched on his hand-held Geiger counter and took a reading. Nothing registered on the gauge. That didn’t prove anything, though. He thought that the radiation might be variable and depend upon the proximity of the visitors or their hardware.

He shook his head and switched the device off. He seemed to be the only person on New Hope Island still capable of rational thought. Radiation wasn’t the only thing contaminating the place. There was a sort of panicky, irrational mood of fear and superstition that seemed contagious. Even the ex-cop and the security guy had fallen prey to it. They’d seemed capable men when he first met them. It was genuinely disappointing. It was disillusioning.

He reminded himself to talk to McIntyre once radio contact was re-established. He would do it discreetly, because he didn’t want to alienate Lucy Church and she was clearly attracted to Paul Napier. But he’d meant what he’d said about getting him fired. No one was going to make a physical threat against Karl Cooper and get away with it. It was something he just wasn’t prepared to tolerate.

And anyway the last thing he needed was a love-rival. If he was going to fuck Lucy — and he was — he needed her undivided attention. Napier’s rightful place was in a Polyester uniform and a cheap peaked cap chasing shop-lifters around the aisles of an inner-city supermarket. He’d got above himself and needed putting back in his sad little slot. A few choice words in McIntyre’s ear would see him sent there. There was no point having influential friends if you didn’t use the influence they had.

The tooth discovered in the crofter’s cottage had led him to his current theory about matters on the island. It had not belonged to Blake. It had belonged to David Shanks. Loose teeth were one of the classic symptoms of prolonged exposure to low to medium levels of radiation. They loosened and eventually they fell out. Obviously the tooth hadn’t belonged to Blake. He hadn’t been on the island for long enough. Fuckwit Napier had put two and two together and characteristically got five.

Radiation did occur on parts of Britain’s Atlantic coast. It came from the coastal nuclear power stations such as the fairly notorious plant at Sellafield. They used sea water to cool their reactor rods. But the level of radiation was negligible and anyway, there had been no nuclear plants in Britain until the 1950s, two decades after David Shanks lived on the island.

The radiation had to have come from the visitors. And its implications were, for Cooper, extremely exciting. It meant that they had not just arrived one day in 1825 and whisked the community members away with them. It meant that they had hung around. It might mean that they had re-visited and kept on returning. And it might mean that they had left something tangible there on the island itself.

It was dangerous intellectually to try to second-guess the motives of a sophisticated alien civilisation. But Cooper did it anyway. There were few cosmologists, he thought, with his natural empathetic understanding of why the visitors came and what they wanted from humbler and simpler cultures than their own.

He figured that they had probably returned to New Hope to see if life on earth was viable and sustainable for them. They would not want to colonise the planet. Their ambition would be more enlightened than that. They would want to see if it was possible to co-exist with human beings.

He was in the settlement. And Jesse Kale was right, it was creepy. Its emptiness was not so much mournful as threatening, somehow. It was bleak and silent and so still that his eyes kept catching phantom movement that couldn’t really be there at the very edge of his peripheral vision. He heard what sounded like a furtive, girlish chuckle and shook his head and smiled. Just a breeze teasing a route through loosened roof-slates.

The tooth was a clue. The church at the centre of the settlement was another. It had been built in the shape it had because to Ballantyne’s community, the visitors must have seemed God-like. They could perform what would have been perceived by the people of the early 19th century as miracles. They were deities. So the dwelling built for them would naturally resemble a place of worship. Logic insisted upon it.

But it had no windows. There was not another church in Christendom that shared this curious characteristic. At first, Cooper had thought this might be because the visitors were too sensitive to sunlight to tolerate exposure during the day. Then he developed another theory more suited to the notion that they kept coming back.

It was the hangar in which they kept their ship. Their ship was the source of the radiation. And if he was right, the church was not only windowless but lead-lined under the plaster that concealed its stone composition within.

He had brought with him the tools to test this theory. He had a hammer and chisel and a drill and a honeycomb cube of little samples boxes. He would take a lead core away for proper analysis. Later, he would get Kale to help him excavate the church floor. He had an excited hunch that the visitors had left something down there; stored and quite possibly intended both as a clue and a gift for whoever had the insight to discover it.

He paused on the threshold of the church, outside the dark arched maw of its entrance, thinking that he was perhaps on the brink of greatness. In some significant ways he knew that he was a flawed individual. He was far from perfect, a long way from the finished article. But he’d worked bloody hard and been very determined and come a long way since the Wigan terrace of a youth dreading what new shame the bailiff’s knock would deliver this time to his poor mother.

He went in. The building’s interior was completely dark. He knew that some light must be allowed in there, spreading from the doorway now behind him. Light travelled. That was a basic law of physics. But it seemed pitch black, nevertheless. He thought that what ambient light there was would enable him to see once his eyes had adjusted after the exposed brightness of the afternoon outside.

There were no pews. There were no pictures or hangings, he remembered, and there was no altar up ahead of him in the single vaulted chamber formed by the walls and the roof. There was something, though. There was movement. As his eyes adjusted, he could make out a shape, denser than the surrounding darkness. There was something solid in the gloom. It shifted and he thought confusedly that what he was seeing made no sense. He could just make out the dimensions of the figure when it moved and it was huge.

Then it spoke to him. And what it said made his bowels void and he stood amid the rising smell of his own shit too petrified to move and it laughed gleefully. And the wreckage of his mind exposed a last living thought and it was the stolen quote he’d given Lucy Church in describing the universe: Not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

The first person Napier saw on returning to the compound was Lucy. She was standing outside, smoking in the windbreak formed by the crates of gear unloaded from the chopper that had carried their cargo to the island. Most of the stuff was still waiting to be unpacked. He saw the boxes containing the mobile gym equipment belonging to their forensic archaeologist, his name stencilled on their sides.

‘Kale’s gone,’ he said. He hadn’t meant to say it. It just came out. Was there any point in secrecy? No, there wasn’t, the body count was too high. Except that there were no bodies to count.

Lucy just nodded. He thought that in other circumstances she would have looked really lovely, with her dark hair blowing about her face the way it was. It was why she was standing in her makeshift shelter. The weather was deteriorating again.

‘Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.’

‘David Shanks spoke to us through Alice this morning,’ she said. ‘He warned us to get away, said there’s something on the island we have to escape. He said we can’t fight it. You’ll hear about it at the meeting in a few minutes. Will you break the news about Kale?’

‘No point trying to conceal it. Any luck with the radio?’

‘None. Your guys are trying to get a signal in shifts. That feedback’s driving them mad.’

‘That feedback isn’t feedback,’ Napier said. ‘We’re being toyed with. It’s been going on since the day I got here. But it’s taken a vindictive turn.’ He looked upwards, at the cloud thickening in rapid scuds across a sullen sky. ‘Even if we had a boat, we couldn’t risk the crossing. Not with night coming and another storm on the way.’ He smiled.

‘What’s funny?’

‘When it started, I thought maybe McIntyre had a covert special effects team here in case you lot didn’t produce the necessary fireworks. What an innocent theory that seems now.’

‘Get me out of this, Paul, and I’ll buy you a very big drink.’

‘If I get you out of this Lucy, I expect you to sleep with me.’

‘Now you sound like Karl Cooper.’

‘Sorry. That was a bad joke.’

‘He hasn’t come back from the settlement yet, by the way. Arrogant fucker, excuse my French.’

‘I’ve noticed how fluent your French is.’

‘Another bad habit,’ she said, flicking away the butt of her cigarette. ‘Shall we go inside?’

He didn’t think they were going to get out of it. He didn’t think she did, either. Her nonchalance was put on. It was an act. But it was a courageous act. He admired her. And he couldn’t honestly remember being more attracted to a woman.

Chairs had been arranged around the main table in the galley. Some of them were unoccupied. When Napier and Lucy sat, he thought that the chairs remaining empty looked very empty indeed.

He’d asked Davis and Walker among his own men to attend. The others there were Lassiter, Jane, Alice and Degrelle. They comprised a forlorn little group. In his absence, it made Napier realise just what a charismatic man Kale had been. He’d possessed energy and presence and Napier felt guilty about him. He’d been the one who’d advised them all the previous night to counter the crisis by resorting to their skills. He thought of the good cheer and positivity Kale had radiated over breakfast and pictured the grisly relic left of him in the Land Rover’s empty interior.

Jane Chambers spoke first. She told the group about that morning’s events at the cottage. The chief sceptic about the paranormal among them wasn’t present. Cooper was still apparently searching for evidence of little green men from another galaxy amid the ruins of the settlement. But Napier thought that even Cooper would have been disconcerted by Jane’s account of what had occurred.

She spoke with the absolute conviction that Shanks had come and communicated with them. He had done so churlishly and perhaps even a little reluctantly. But it had been his voice and his warning to them could not have been more explicit or grave. They were in mortal danger. They were not asked to leave. They were implored to escape.

When Jane had finished speaking Napier looked at Lassiter and Lassiter raised an eyebrow in assent and he told them about his trip aboard the quad bike to check on Kale at the peat bog and the gruesome evidence he’d discovered there.

None of it looked like news to the ex-detective. But then Lassiter’s conviction that Kale should have returned sooner was what had prompted Napier to go looking for their archaeologist in the first place.

There was a silence after Napier had finished speaking. He’d begun his account thinking that it would conclude with general dismay and possibly a bit of panic and the need to talk one or two of his listeners down.

That didn’t happen, though. There was no one present who any longer believed they were confronted by imaginary fears. They were all genuinely scared. There was no discord. There was only the need for a coherent strategy to try to save their lives.

There was silence in the galley in the aftermath of his story. Outside the wind howled, growing in strength, buffeting the fabric of their shelter, making the titanium struts shaping it and the steel cabling keeping its shape taut, groan and sing with the effort. Rain hammered relentless on the roof.

Davis said, ‘Where’s Karl Cooper?’

Lassiter looked at his watch. He said, ‘He should have returned from the settlement an hour ago. He’s on his own. That was made clear to him before he set off. No one’s going out there after him in this.’

‘He could shelter in the tannery or the distillery,’ Alice said. ‘He might be better doing that than trying to walk back here in this weather.’

‘I wouldn’t fancy a night up there alone,’ Davis said. ‘Even before what we’ve just been told, I wouldn’t have fancied it.’

‘Ignorance is bliss,’ Walker said.

‘He won’t be alone,’ Jane said. ‘The little green men will have invited him to supper.’

Nobody laughed at the joke.

Degrelle cleared his throat with a rumbling cough. He said, ‘There is something I need to tell you all about the island and what happened here. It may not effect matters materially, but it informs what I intend to do tomorrow. I would prefer to do what I intend to in an atmosphere of hope and belief rather than general incredulity and scepticism. So I will tell you what I know.’

He smiled. It looked an effort for him to do so. ‘Let us take a short break before I begin,’ he said. ‘And I think a drink might be a sensible preparation for what I have to say.’

Napier looked at Alice, who looked sharply at Lassiter. He smiled at her and shook his head slowly and Napier felt relieved. He thought the ex-policeman his wisest and most resourceful ally in all this and so the last thing he wanted was to see him back on the bottle.

Chapter Twenty-One

Professor Philip Fortescue was better looking than McIntyre expected him to be. He had a portentous job-title and a sing-song Liverpudlian lilt to his voice that grated a bit on the phone. But in the flesh he was tall and fine-featured with wavy strawberry-blond hair he wore quite long. He was shy and hid rather behind the armour of his gold-framed spectacles. But he was not timid. He was fired up and determined.

‘Start at the beginning, Professor. Tell me all of it.’

‘You know the sea chest stuff. I don’t think there’s all that much time. We can’t sit around chatting.’

‘You’ve just endured a five hour drive. You need to eat something. I’ll order some food and a pot of coffee. You can’t run on empty, as our American friends are so rightly fond of saying.’

‘I don’t have any American friends.’

‘But you do know what I mean.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Persuade me of the provenance of the Horan journal and if you do I’ll read it and if I’m convinced by what it contains, I will help you in any way I can. I don’t see how I can say much fairer than that.’

Fortescue told him about Edith Chambers’ first phone call and Jacob Parr and the short account of the Great Affliction he had found. He told him about the Barnsley Nightingale and Lassiter’s name-change hunch and Emma Foot and his ordeal in the Elsinore Pit and the failure of Ballantyne’s bird to arrive. Then McIntyre read the journal as his guest first paused for breath and then ate ravenously.

He read with mixed emotions. The New Hope Island vanishing had fascinated him since childhood. He had abandoned his earlier, cherished belief in alien intervention without feeling as much disappointment as he would have expected to. Ever since viewing the film Shanks had shot and Lassiter had cleverly tracked down, he had suspected, at least subconsciously, that the mystery had in reality a much darker explanation.

He had not thought, though, that it would be as sinister as the Horan journal implied it was. He had thought the apparition Cooper had called a revenant just some poor restless spirit, an infant wretch unaware she had died of cholera or typhoid. The journal suggested it was something demonic, brought back in the shape of Ballantyne’s dead daughter to taunt him.

The fact that it was still there when Shanks had settled on New Hope was disturbing. The idea that it might still be there now, though, was terrifying. Seeing it in two dimensions on a screen in a viewing room was bad enough when you were cradling a large glass of single malt whisky. Having it creep up while you slept and wake you with its antic laughter was the stuff of nightmares.

While the spectre of his dead daughter had been taunting Ballantyne, his community had been slowly and deliberately consumed. They had called it the Great Affliction and it had invaded their Kingdom of Belief. But it had also been the Being that Hungers in the Darkness; something born of virulent magic a continent distant to pursue and destroy in a vengeful spree and the vanishing had been the consequence.

McIntyre finished reading and closed the journal. He was no longer in any doubt about what had happened to the community on New Hope Island. He now felt that he knew conclusively. And the knowledge gave him no satisfaction at all. He felt sick and empty with dread at what he’d sent people into.

‘The thing is it’s still there, Mr McIntyre,’ Fortescue said. ‘Horan is emphatic on that because the sorcerer stressed the point with such certainty and solemnity. He regretted unleashing it, even as he lay dying. Unless the ritual is enacted that counters it, unless those words are recited that stops it, it just carries on. That’s what it was born for. That’s all it knows.’

Spite made flesh, McIntyre thought.

‘They’ll perish there if it isn’t put an end to. All of them.’

McIntyre didn’t reply. He was thinking of the scream Napier had reported hearing from Blake before failing to find Blake’s body. He was thinking about the joke he had made at the missing man’s expense.

‘What do you need?’ he said to Fortescue.

‘Is there still no radio contact with New Hope?’

‘There’s been no communication whatsoever since lunchtime yesterday.’

‘Think it will be re-established?’

‘I’m sceptical we’ll restore it anytime soon.’

‘Then I want you to charter me a helicopter.’

‘There’s an Atlantic storm in the vicinity of New Hope. It may last for a couple of days. The weather is still deteriorating there as we speak. Nothing is flying in that airspace.’

‘Charter me a boat, then. I have to get to the island.’

‘Can you handle a boat? Can you navigate?’

‘Theoretically, I can. I work at a maritime museum.’

‘We’ll take my plane from here to Mallaig and charter a vessel there. We may encounter some reluctance from the boat hire people, but we’ll get something if I pay over the odds. The Scots are passionately fond of money and I say that from personal experience. Though the coast guard will strongly advise against our going out, they can’t physically stop us, whatever the weather.’

‘You’re coming with me?’

‘I’m an experienced sailor from a seafaring family. I did my national service as a navigation officer aboard a battle cruiser and I’ve messed about in boats since I was a young child. Captains Pugwash and Birdseye have more legitimate seagoing expertise than you possess, young man. And those people are my responsibility. I sent them to New Hope Island.’

Degrelle told his little congregation what the Cardinal had told him. It was what Samuel Trent had imparted in the confessional after his escape in an open boat from New Hope Island in 1823. He had fled a full two years before the vanishing of the settlement. But strange and brutal things were going on there and the boy had played his murderous part in those events.

Ballantyne’s daughter Rachel died of diphtheria at the age of ten in 1806. She had been loved and she was mourned. But she did not stay restful in her grave. She returned to haunt the captain on New Hope. Her ragged apparition terrified the community and drove their spiritual leader half-mad with despair.

He would see her. And then he would not see her for weeks. He would foster in himself the half-dared hope that she had gone forever. And then one day he would feel a chill and lift his gaze and see her watching him from the heights or wake to see her standing inches above the floor at the foot of his bed, staring at him with the eyes that were only empty sockets now.

He knew the source of the magic that had rekindled her and contaminated her spirit with evil. He remembered his sadistic treatment of the sorcerer aboard the slave ship he had commanded in his former, sinful life. He knew that this was the man’s revenge for the punitive mutilation that had ended his existence.

Ballantyne thought he knew what it was that would break the spell tormenting him and manipulating Rachel’s tortured soul. And that was sacrifice. He had learned something of the customs of the countries he had traded with. He had spoken with their shamans and their holy men and their mystics and their priests and they all insisted sacrifice was the key to power and prosperity.

He knew it from Allbache and Dahomey and half a dozen other kingdoms he had traded with in Africa. He would pay for the power in blood to eradicate forever the dark magic contaminating his own Kingdom of Belief.

At first, Degrelle told his silent audience, he sacrificed only the dying. Then, he sacrificed the old. And when that did not work, he sacrificed the sick, if they ailed to an extent where it did not look like they would fully recover.

All of this was done in secret. None of the people from the mainland with whom the island’s commerce was conducted ever found out about it. But it did not work. Still Ballantyne was tormented by the spectre of the child he had loved and lost and grieved for so bitterly.

He built a special place, his Temple of Darkness, a church without windows in which the sacrificial ceremonies could be staged with elaborate ritual. He recruited boys from among his community to carry out the sacrifices for him.

These were accomplished with cleavers, said Samuel Trent, who was one of the boys instructed to carry out this bloody task. There were robes and incantations. Candles spluttered and incense wafted pungently. But Trent said it was no different really in method from the slaughter of a goat.

The sacrifices never entirely stopped. They decreased in number when they were seen even by the leader of the settlement to have no effect in freeing him from his torment. But by that time they were a part of what New Hope saw as its own religious orthodoxy. And so they continued, one a month, the sacrificial victim chosen by the drawing of lots.

‘He was a fucking lunatic,’ Walker said, when Degrelle had finished. ‘Sorry about the language, Father.’

‘I’ve heard worse,’ Degrelle said, smiling faintly.

‘He was a butcher,’ Alice said.

‘Thank God you didn’t enter the church when we went to the settlement,’ Lassiter said to her. ‘It was a charnel house.’

‘A Temple of Darkness,’ Jane said, ‘in a Kingdom of Belief. What are you going to do, Father? Are you going to sanctify the building?’

‘If there is anything demonic on the island, that will be its home,’ Degrelle said. ‘I will perform the rite of exorcism there in the morning.’

‘Weather permitting,’ Lucy said.

‘The weather won’t enter into it,’ Degrelle said. ‘I will brave the tempest or the deluge, my dear. It is what the Cardinal sent me here to do.’

‘You’re nervous about it, aren’t you, Father?’ Napier said.

Dregrelle said, ‘I’m fortunate in that I’ve never for one moment doubted my faith. But I don’t think I’ve ever faced a test as formidable as this. The island has been drenched in innocent blood. It has been a bastion of sinful pride and blasphemy. For two centuries, it has been contaminated with evil. It is a wicked place.’

‘I’m nervous just about tonight,’ Davis said. ‘That storm sounds pretty fierce. And it’s strengthening.’

‘You’re not as nervous as Cooper’s going to be, alone in that abandoned settlement,’ Lucy said.

‘He isn’t alone,’ Degrelle said. ‘Some living affront to God lurks in the church without windows. Something spewed from hell is harboured in that stone insult to Christian faith. He has that creature in the settlement for company.’

Lassiter said, ‘Does anyone really think Karl Cooper is still alive?’

‘I don’t,’ Alice said.

Walker said, ‘I should think that settles it, then,’ and he barked a laugh that sounded to Napier uncomfortably close to hysteria.

There wasn’t much drinking or much conversation after Degrelle had said his piece. He stated that he intended to set off for the settlement to perform his sacrament at dawn. Then he left for his room and his vigil of prayer and whatever scant ration of sleep that heavyweight penitent allowed himself.

Napier felt pretty tired on his own account. He was close to sleep himself when he heard a soft knocking through the thud and crush of wind outside, against his door.

It was Lucy. She closed the door behind her and shed her clothes still walking and slipped into the single bunk beside him. She felt deliciously warm.

‘What’s this?’

‘I suppose you could call it a down-payment on the bill for saving my life.’

‘I’m really sorry I said that.’

‘I know you are. If you weren’t, I wouldn’t be here.’

He reached his arms around her and held her tightly to him. He kissed her.

When the kiss broke she said, ‘I’m going with Degrelle in the morning. It’s my job. If something happens, I need to be there to see it.’

‘Above and beyond, I’d say.’

‘I’m scared,’ she said. ‘Just hold me, Paul.’

They held each other at the start, flesh on flesh, entangled together. At the finish, they fell asleep that way.

Lassiter and Alice lay in her bed together, awake. She said, ‘I’m worried about what will happen to you, Patrick, if anything happens to me.’

After a moment he said, ‘What about the others?’

‘Jane and Lucy are coping. So is Napier, remarkably. His man Walker is on the verge of cracking up, though. And we have a priest in denial about the loss of his faith.’

‘You don’t need to worry about me,’ Lassiter said. ‘I haven’t left your side since hearing about the warning in the cottage and I won’t, now. If anything happens to you, I’ll already be dead.’

Shortly after he said that, she fell asleep. And Lassiter suddenly remembered the young professor from Liverpool with the arcane job title he’d refused to help because he could not let Alice come here on her own. He didn’t feel at all confident about his ability to protect her. They were all of them clueless here, all of them miles out of their depth. They were helpless, no more any of them really he feared, than prey. (Bit of a weird sentence here, doesn’t really make sense.)

He wondered had the Keeper of Artefacts had any success in his search for the lost document compiled aboard the Andromeda. He very much doubted now that he would ever get the chance to have that question answered.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Waves broke white and wrathful over the bow. The craft bucketed under their weight and immensity. The stink of Diesel rose through the smart of brine. ‘My father captained one of these,’ McIntyre said, roaring into the tempest to be heard. To Fortescue, he seemed almost exultant, ‘modest upbringing, mine. Self-made wealth, my lad, it’s the only sort worth having.’ He cackled like a pirate happily freed from the moorings of sanity.

Wind moaned and shrilled through the rust stained superstructure. Their toiling engine made the steel deck thrum under his feet. Philip Fortescue lifted his head and the sky was bruise coloured and tumultuous above him when he raised his eyes to blink at it through the deluge it spat down.

They hadn’t been able to hire a boat. They’d arrived at Mallaig too late for that. Instead, McIntyre had bought an old trawler from a man they’d met in a pub on the harbour. It didn’t seem at the time the most watertight of arrangements to Fortescue, but he had to concede, however grudgingly, that it was the quickest way in the circumstances to get them to the island.

McIntyre said the tub they were aboard was the same class of vessel his father had worked out of Aberdeen, fishing for mackerel. Fortescue’s educated guess was that she was about sixty or seventy years past her prime. But McIntyre’s logic was that a working boat was the safest bet to get them where they were going in the conditions confronting them. On land, it had seemed a more convincing argument.

They had started their voyage in calm weather. The harbour had been tranquil and the open sea beyond it an emerald waste disturbed only by the odd whitecap. They had set a deliberate course for the island and therefore, for the storm raging around it. Now they were cresting rises that sent them careening down into canyons of black water. And McIntyre seemed to be enjoying it. He was evidently one of those infuriating men enlivened by a dangerous challenge.

The swell gleamed and glimmered in the yellow spread cast by the bow light. Fortescue was reminded of the Dylan Thomas poem; the one about singing in chains. He was almost delirious with fear. He supposed elemental was the word, but he hadn’t known the elements were anywhere near as vast and delinquent as this.

It was a failure of imagination, he knew, because his job, over the years, had offered him an abundance of clues. Vessel foundered was a familiar phrase to him. So was, all hands lost. In mitigation, theory and practice were an unplumbed distance apart. He did not think that you could imagine the violence of the sea in an Atlantic storm. You really had to witness this phenomenon first hand.

The boat pitched, McIntyre cackling dementedly as he wrestled with the wheel against the rudder and forced their course.

Fortescue puked over the side. He’d already parted with the expensive meal his host had provided him with at the Hotel on the loch. Anything else he was retching up was bile. It was close to midnight and they were making about 14 knots according to his mad, elderly skipper and it was the longest waking day of his life.

The previous day had earlier qualified as the longest day of his life, but its title had been dismayingly short lived. An abandoned mine shaft at the Elsinore Pit outside Barnsley was uncomfortable and testing. Being on a boat in a storm as severe as this was infinitely greater an ordeal.

He looked at the water, uneasy in the knowledge that it was a thousand fathoms deep. It was a dark and silent graveyard down there, littered with hulks like the one he was aboard. He puked again and closed his eyes but with his eyes closed, he felt if possible, even worse. There was that anodyne phrase, wasn’t there? I’m out of my comfort zone. Beyond that, though, there was the abyss of uncertainty he felt he teetered above. I’m not out of my comfort zone, he thought. I’m totally out of my depth.

Sour-throated and with no saliva, he croaked out the words of the ritual to himself. He had learned them by heart. They needed to be recited with vigour and commitment. That was what Horan’s journal had implied. Merely incanting the phonetic sounds and phrases would not do it. Strength and concentration were required to evoke the necessary magic. They had been qualities beyond the sorcerer, remorseful over what he had unleashed, as he lay lapsing in and out of consciousness, dying in the slave hold of the Andromeda.

Should he survive this crossing and reach New Hope, Fortescue would recite the words he had memorised there himself, enact the ritual and so save Jane Chambers the bother. There would be no real need then to pass the journal on to her at all.

He would give it to her anyway. He had no wish to cross the ghost of Jacob Parr. Parr had not sounded particularly nice when Edith had described him and Horan’s description was of a sly and self-serving man treacherous and entirely without principle.

So why had he helped? Edith had thought that he did so only reluctantly. Someone or something had scared his truculent spirit into obliging. That suggested there were good as well as malevolent forces at work. Of course there were. It was a battle, wasn’t it? It was a conflict that had been going on since the dawn of recorded time. Fortescue didn’t really want to pursue that line of thought too far, though. Not aboard a boat in a storm, he didn’t. Events seemed fatalistic enough as it was.

McIntyre was singing. He was singing a fucking sea shanty. Was there no mercy? Fortescue could half-hear the bellowed verses in odd lines not snatched away by the gale. He recognised the tune. It was The Wild Goose. It was a song Kate Rusby sang on the album, Sleepless.

He did not honestly have any great optimism that he would survive this crossing, never mind this whole experience. He was acting only out of a rash promise made over the phone to a sobbing adolescent girl. If he did by some fluke make it, he resolved there and then that he would never listen to music of that sort again. It was too maudlin, altogether too mournful and sad. From now on, for Phil Fortescue, it was going to be Metallica. Iron Maiden, if he was in a particularly wistful mood.

There was a radio aboard the trawler, a powerful old analogue transmitter with a range that enabled it to pick up almost anything. The aerial reached above the wheelhouse but the set itself was in the galley below, where the charts and distress flares and other bits and pieces of important nautical kit were kept.

Soaked through, shivering and sick to the bone, he went down to try to divert himself from the physical fact of the storm by trying to make contact with the expedition base. It was his third attempt to do so. Dregs of cocoa lay staining an enamel mug on the table bearing the transmitter. He had parted company with the mug’s contents over the gunwale about an hour earlier. He retched sourly at the memory and sat with a grimace in front of the set.

There was traffic, but it was all from the mainland. Unsurprisingly, theirs seemed to be the only boat out in the area. He turned the tuning dial and got onto the wavelength he wanted and listened intently to the silence. There was a low scratch of static. And then the static clarified into what resembled, more than anything, a childlike wail. It was a disconsolate moan of infant grief.

Then as he listened, it changed in character. It turned slyly into a whisper. He shivered. It was a spooky sound. If you were fanciful, it sounded like words, the phrase no hope repeated like a mantra over and over again. It was not something he could endure down there in the gloom of the galley on his own.

A colossal wave broached then and the boat shuddered along its length with the impact and lurched so that he had to grab the table to keep from being flung to the cabin floor. The enamel mug clattered away into a corner and he heard the rivets of the old hull groan and ping in the roar of the wind. Sea water from the swamped deck above deluged down the steps of the companionway and he feared with sudden and overwhelming dread they were simply going to wallow engulfed and sink.

Under him, he sensed the craft slowly righting herself. He felt her level off and rise as the weight of water on the deck diminished, sloughing away. Moments earlier he had been pondering on fate. Fate might think it funny to store a keeper of marine artefacts forever aboard a rusting vessel on the ocean floor. It might seem fitting, somehow. It was a comfortless thought, one that brought fresh terror clutching at his cold, wet skin.

Horan’s journal was down there, in a shallow draw designed for charts built into the table at which he sat, snugly housed now in a waterproof case designed to carry a laptop in. With an incredulous shake of his head, he remembered his daydream of helping Jane Chambers clarify its arcane 18th century phraseology. He had indulged in that particular fantasy before he had read very much of it. He had not known when he’d done so of the unholy danger its pages would tell him she faced.

He switched off the transmitter. This wouldn’t do. He needed to find some fortitude from somewhere within himself. He would steel himself and swallow back the bile and make his lunatic shipmate something hot and fortifying to drink.

When he did so, he discovered McIntyre’s mood had grown more sombre. There was no song bellowing forth from him now. He was watchful and tense, his hands caressing the wheel as he coaxed their elderly craft through the cavorting seas. Every plate and stanchion of her seemed to groan, as she shuddered through the turmoil of the waves. Despite this, the wheelhouse seemed to Fortescue almost a cosy refuge from the havoc of the elements outside. Within it, they could watch the storm welter and rage, dry behind the decades of scratches dulling its toughened Perspex windows.

‘I like young men,’ McIntyre said, sipping the cocoa his companion had made him.

‘Is this really the moment for a confession of that sort?’

‘I don’t mean sexually, you bloody idiot. I like the energy of young men, when they have something about them that reminds me of myself when I was young.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘Recently, my judgement has been impaired, in that particular area. I’m telling you, professor, because should we survive this experience, I would very much like for you to regard me as your friend. I am a good friend, loyal and generous, as I hope you will live to discover.’

‘I’m not much like you, Mr McIntyre.’

‘Perhaps you’re not. But you possess great courage and that’s a quality I admire in a man.’

‘Do I?’

‘You do.’

‘I don’t feel particularly brave.’

‘Really courageous men never do, I don’t think. Only the stupid are truly fearless. The rest of us struggle to overcome our instinct to shirk or to flee.’

‘I’m familiar with that struggle.’

‘Yet you’re here.’

Fortescue shrugged. The queasiness had left him. He thought that he might have found his sea legs, suddenly. He felt grateful for the reprieve. ‘I’ve surprised myself, really,’ he said. ‘I’m not greatly suited to this sort of task.’

‘No one is,’ McIntyre said, looking at him.

Fortescue could only nod in agreement.

‘Should we become friends, I would vastly prefer you call me by my Christian name.’

‘Alexander?’

‘Alex to you,’ McIntyre said.

‘In that case,’ Fortescue said, ‘you’d better call me Phil.’

There was a silence between them. Outside, the wind withered. Spume scattered on the Perspex shield sheltering them from the elements.

‘Do you think they’re dead?’

‘If they are,’ McIntyre said, ‘I’ve killed them. You reach a level of power and influence and people become pawns you can shift about in whatever capricious game you decide to play. They become pieces you manipulate at will, nothing more. It’s taken this experience to open my eyes to that reality. So I hope with all my heart they’re not dead. I’ll get us through this voyage, I promise you that. Beyond that, I can only pray and beseech and beg we are in time.’

‘Actually pray, you mean? Do you believe in God?’

‘At this precise moment, Phil, it seems expedient to do so.’

There was no sign at all of the four man sentry patrol Napier had detailed before they closed down the compound for the night. When he went outside they had gone. It was as though they had never been there.

He went to rouse Davis. He wanted to know had there been any talk of slipping away, taking their own chances, among his men. It seemed unlikely to him. Given the ferocity of the gale that still battered the island, it seemed an outlandish prospect. They couldn’t have got off New Hope and they were surely no more secure anywhere on it than here, where there were solid structures and at least the illusion of safety in numbers.

Davis looked sheepish. ‘There has been a bit of speculative planning,’ he said. ‘By that I mean last resort talk. A couple of the boys have suggested fitting out the rigid inflatable we found and scarpering in that.’

‘We put sand in the outboard’s petrol tank,’ Napier said.

‘No. We didn’t. You instructed one of the lads to do it but we took an independent line on that one, Paul. We’re none of us any longer obliged to obey your orders. This isn’t the army and in the circumstances, sabotaging our only viable means of escape seemed a bit foolhardy.’

‘Not foolhardy,’ Napier said, ‘completely bloody stupid. It was a bad decision and you were wise to ignore it. The boat wasn’t holed?’

‘It was left intact.’

‘Do you think they’ve taken it?’

Davis looked around. The wind was buffeting them both even in the substantial shelter of the unpacked crates of gear. The rain was a deluge needling into them at 45 degrees, the rubberised fabric of the ponchos both men wore snapping and rippling wetly. ‘No, I don’t,’ he said. ‘I suspect they’ve gone the way of Carrick and Kale. I hope I’m wrong, but that’s what I honestly think. We need a fucking miracle, Paul.’

Napier said, ‘We’ve got a priest. Let’s hope he can provide us with one.’

Davis said, ‘He doesn’t look up to it. Not to me, he doesn’t.’

Napier sounded to his own ears like he was down to clutching at straws. They had no idea really of what it was they were up against. All they knew was that they were disappearing. Something was taking them one by one. They were confronted by something monstrous and cunning and it was devouring them.

Davis said, ‘Last night, when the ladies described Shanks speaking through that shapely psychic of ours, they said he called the magic Ju Ju, like in Africa. But this is different from what I saw there, back then. The tribesmen in that village were just dabbling.’

‘You told me they sacrificed a child.’

‘They did. It was malicious enough, but I don’t think they properly knew what they were doing. They knew some of the customs, but they were posturing. It was mischief. They could no more conjure real magic than I could. But there’s real magic here and I believe what came out of the psychic’s mouth when she sat in that rocking chair. It really was Shanks warning us through her and I get the feeling he was a bloke who’d been around the block.’

‘He’d been around the block and then some.’

‘It was him. And he knew what he was talking about and he was speaking the truth. It’s real and ancient and evil and it’s here.’

Napier shuddered. ‘We should get out of the cold and rain,’ he said. He smiled, mirthlessly. ‘We’ll catch our deaths.’

‘It’s funny, in a way.’ Davis said.

‘What is?’

‘The timing,’ Davis said, wincing up at the sky, through the rain. ‘I read about the way you went to pieces, after that third Helmand tour. The tabloids made a meal of you. The detail was pretty lurid; the degradation. Was it all true?’

‘Pretty much true, yes, I suppose. I don’t think they could have exaggerated it, really. Not from what I remember of it, anyway. Why do you bring it up now? Why do you think it funny?’

‘It’s just the timing, like I say, Paul. It’s more ironic, actually, than funny. You’ve put yourself back together. When you walked into the cottage the other day, I knew that there was no one I would rather serve alongside. You’ve recovered completely. You’ve got back your courage and nerve. It must have been hard to do and now it’s all for nothing.’

Napier nodded. He would accept the compliment, which he knew was sincerely meant. In other circumstances, he would have reprimanded Davis for defeatist talk. But to do so would be to patronise the man. And it would be hypocritical. They were in full agreement, weren’t they? Neither of them believed they had a hope in hell.

Chapter Twenty-Three

All but one of them went in the end, a bedraggled wet procession of enfeebled faith and helplessness, Degrelle’s sacramental trinkets dulled under the grey sky, without the sparkle Napier thought they should have worn to look as though they were going to work their ceremonial magic.

They marched in silence over the sodden ground; the three women hand in hand and pale, each to their separate thoughts despite this physical show of solidarity shared between them. The wind and driving rain obliged anyone wishing to speak to bellow out their words. But nobody said anything. It wasn’t worth the effort. There was nothing further for any of them of any consequence left to say.

Walker stayed behind. He had volunteered to keep on trying with the radio. Napier considered him remaining back at the compound the lesser of two evils. He was close to cracking up. Exposure to an experience of the settlement was the last thing his frayed nerves needed. It was the last thing any of them needed, but accompanying Degrelle seemed more tolerable an option for the rest than waiting back at the compound only to discover later that he’d failed.

The thing consuming them was becoming greedier. The more it fed, the more its appetite grew. There had been a longish interval between Blake and Carrick. But between Carrick and Kale there had been only a day. Napier did not expect to find anything of Karl Cooper when they got to the settlement. Unless he found what Cooper had derided as a bit of tooth enamel.

Four men had gone in the night. That amounted to six in less than 24 hours. If Degrelle’s exorcism failed, and it would, how long did the rest of them have left? How long before the last of them perished? If they patched the boat, they could not survive a crossing in this weather. It would capsize in the heaving seas.

Even if the weather improved, they wouldn’t be safe aboard the craft. He had heard what had happened to its original passengers and crew. None had survived whatever had attacked them. All had died, screaming. Not a single body had washed up, not a single item of personal kit even, not as much as a life-jacket or hairbrush, wallet or water bottle.

They were enduring the same experience as the original New Hope settlers. It was evident to Napier that they were as helpless to prevent it now as the community here had been then. They were one by one disappearing, weren’t they? They were only an added chapter. Not even that, because there were so few of them. They were a footnote to the story of the vanishing, nothing more.

They were there. They had reached New Hope’s dismal hamlet of old stone and human atrocity. And something atrocious and old and not remotely human, Napier thought. It wasn’t going to work, this. He knew with a deflated feeling in his gut that it would not. Whatever antagonist they faced, it was more than some poor unwilling victim of demonic possession. This was not just a reluctant sort of malice. There was a gleeful, capering relish to what it did.

Degrelle suggested they wait in the tannery for him. It was a sturdy building and at least a shelter from the scouring wind and dry. He was grateful they had chosen to accompany him there and said as much. But what he had been sent to do there, he had to try to accomplish on his own.

It was hard to avoid the conclusion that this was goodbye. It was difficult to sustain eye contact with the man. He smoked a last cigarette before his departure from them. His faith considered that one a tolerable vice. He looked white-faced and filled with a fateful sort of trepidation. He was there only because he had been ordered to go, a soldier of God obeying a command. There was no bluster about him now. Napier felt afraid for him, knowing that they all did in that desolate moment.

They watched him walk through the rain across the granite and scrub of the ground. He walked stiffly, his polished brogues splashing through odd puddles on their stolid progress. He wore no ceremonial vestments, but for a purple stole. It flapped in the wind and he held it still with his free hand. In the other he carried the small leather case containing his chalice and hosts and his holy water and prayer book. He didn’t need this last item, Napier didn’t think. He would know the liturgy by heart. But his sort of priest did not go into battle without every item of his armour strapped securely into place.

Napier sneaked a look at Alice Lang. Lucy and Jane’s account of her cottage transformation had been both vivid and chilling. What vestiges remained about the place of David Shanks had physically inhabited her to serve them a warning. And the warning had been grave and unequivocal. They had not the means to fight against this skulking monster conjured by dark magic. He had tried and failed to do it. Their only hope lay in fleeing the island. And they had not the means to engineer escape.

They heard the scream about 20 minutes later. It seemed longer to them of course, enduring their vigil in the tannery, beneath the dripping beams of its skeletal roof. But it was not any more in actuality than that. It sounded very loud and sudden. It carried hoarsely despite the wind that withered through the ruins surrounding them.

‘I’ll go,’ Lucy said.

‘I will,’ Napier said.

‘No, Paul. You won’t. You’ll do your job and try to protect the group from harm. And if you die doing it, Davis will take over. And Patrick is going to keep his promise and stay with Alice. So I’ll go.’

‘Don’t do it, Lucy,’ Jane said.

‘He might be alive, in need of help.’

‘He won’t be.’

‘If it’s taken him, it will have gone,’ Lucy said. ‘That’s what it does. It’s good at hiding itself. How many has it taken? None of us has seen it.’

‘That’s true,’ Jane said.

‘Unless Degrelle was right,’ Alice said, ‘and the temple is its home.’

Lucy walked out of the tannery doorway. She turned once, about ten yards distant and smiled and shrugged and then continued on her way. Napier remembered she had been exactly like this in war. She was brave and fatalistic and achingly beautiful.

It was by far the longest walk of Lucy’s life. She had blundered into a minefield in Helmand Province once and been chucked an item a bit like a javelin to try to prod her way out of it with. That had been bad, but this was worse. To mix metaphors as poor James Carrick had specialised in doing, there had been light then at the end of the tunnel. Here there did not seem to be as much as a hint of it.

If she was going to die, and she was certain she was, she decided she might as well get death over with. It was lousy timing that she had met a man as attractive as Paul Napier was in these bleakly hopeless circumstances, but since he was going to die too, maybe they’d share a romantic afterlife. That was a pleasant thought it was just a shame she had no faith in.

It was the way he had stilled the flapping stole on the way to perform his rite that had done it. At that moment the pity she felt for the vain, flawed cleric had almost been overwhelming. She had to make sure that he was not there, inside, alive and in need of help or just the solace of a hand to hold.

He might have suffered a heart attack or a stroke. He was not a man who took good care of his health. He’d been as frightened as any of them. He had probably been taken. The scream had sounded chillingly final. But Lucy had to know. He might be enduring his final moments of life, prone and shivering in there in the gloom. If he was, she would offer what warmth and consolation she could to him.

The windowless church was even darker than she’d anticipated it would be, when she stepped through its arched doorway. She thought there was a slight odour of stale blood. They would not have been able to sluice it all away after their sacrificial slaughter. Some of the gore would have seeped between the flagstones of the floor and congealed there in the cracks.

But it was probably her imagination more than her sense of smell, suggesting blood. Organic matter didn’t linger for centuries, did it? Should she live to see her again, she would have to ask Jane Chambers about that.

There was no sign of Degrelle. She listened for the laboured harshness of his breathing, but all was silence. She could see no slumped body. She searched for the lustre of his spilled chalice and the scattered paleness of his communion hosts on the floor. She swallowed, knowing that all semblance of the priest had gone. He was vanished, wasn’t he? He was consumed.

There was movement ahead of her there; a kind of denser darkness than the prevailing gloom, roiling and flexing and as her eyes adjusted, huge in its malevolent size. She saw that it was crouched so that the building could accommodate its limbs. It smiled and she saw its teeth glimmer. It spoke, or rather crooned and there was a wet intimacy to the words and they were of a language strange and unbearable to hear.

To her disgust, she discovered she could understand what it was saying.

So few, it said, after so long a wait. I cannot draw out the suffering as I did before. I am impatient with appetite. When there were more I could make them dread me. Their agony was in the waiting. My last morsel was their king. I took him as he waited still for the hope that never came. His screams were music and his death leisurely. I was sated. Now I hunger and thirst and so yours will be quick.

She had to buy time. She discovered suddenly and overwhelmingly that she was nowhere near as resigned as she’d thought she’d been, only moments earlier, to the prospect of dying. She was far too young. She had far too much too much living still unlived to do.

It wasn’t the trivial stuff. It wasn’t the VIP parties and exclusive previews and glitzy premiers. It wasn’t the newsroom gossip or the prominent by-lines or the secrets confided by starry interview subjects lulled into indiscretion. It was the words forming memorable sentences in the books she hadn’t written and perhaps the children she had not yet given birth to. She had never been in love before. And now she realised she was, ardently so.

And there was the manner of the dying. She looked at the great creature slouched and drooling, gaining awful detail as her eyes adjusted. She saw its scales and the hair bristle from its leathery hide and she could not help but think she was worth more than this squalid outcome. She’d lived an industrious and compassionate life. It was shortly to be extinguished in a way that was not just undignified, but grotesque.

‘Shanks got away from you. The man who built the cottage escaped you, didn’t he?’

It paused. She could hear it thinking. She could hear the clatter of its mind, remembering.

The magician, it said. He cheated me. So I pursued him. And when I finally discovered him I ate his soul and led him to the void.

With a spasmodic shift it reached a mandible for her and she banged her head hard on a wall she’d been unaware of, right behind where she stood. Instinct had backed her against it when the dark thing first spoke to her in that loathsome voice.

She felt her lips prised apart, her mouth opened forcibly by some thorny and hurtful intrusion as something rooted deep in her was wrenched from her gum in a tearful blossoming of pain. The intrusion withdrew. She probed with her tongue. There was an absence in her teeth, a gap and a socket welling with warm, fresh blood. She heard the monster before her simper then, with glee.

The limb that had reached for her recoiled and the thing in the darkness mewled and shifted and slouched forward to take her and Lucy sank to her knees with her jaw throbbing and her mouth welling and leaking and someone blundered past her in what felt against her face like the brush of oilskin and she heard something being recited loudly, urgently.

Everything seemed somehow muffled. Even the throb of pain from her gum felt dull. She was concussed, she thought, spitting blood. She turned her head and in the doorway saw Alexander McIntyre framed in a halo of light. He was wearing a pea coat and rubber boots and there was a woollen watch cap pulled down low over his head of white hair.

He had on his wind-burned face an anxious look she had never seen before. This was not an impression from life, was it? It was the chemical confusion of a failing brain. She wasn’t just concussed. Her paper’s proprietor did not do fancy dress. It wasn’t plausible at all. What an absurd image on which to exit her short existence. Lucy knew with a resigned certainty that she must just then have slipped away from life.

Words were expelled in a guttural grunt that was almost percussive in its aggression and rhythm and she thought that the voice sounded righteous and furious too. The tongue being spoken in seemed strange and ancient. And the dark thing screamed and cowered at what was being said to it. It moaned and sank into itself and its withering hide erupted and bled in stinking rivulets onto the flagstone floor.

She fought unconsciousness. She tried to look at the man speaking. In the gloom she thought that he looked tall and slender in a yellow overall like the sort trawler men wore aboard their boats. His red-blond hair was long, plastered in wet tresses down to his shoulders. He seemed altogether too slight and un-exotic to be capable of the language exploding harshly out of him. The words and phrases sang and reverberated. They chimed and struck like hammer blows.

He held a book in his hand. He gesticulated with it. As he recited, he flaunted the volume he held before the stricken, writhing beast. He flayed the air with his speech and the creature shrank and whimpered before this relentless assault of sound.

She wasn’t dead. She might not even be dying. But she could make no sense at all of what was happening. Her head hurt and she could feel blood trickling and gluey in her hair. She could taste blood, leaking in her mouth. Her torn gum throbbed with the raw insult of pain. She closed her eyes and let oblivion claim her. At that moment, it seemed the easiest and least complicated thing for her to do.

Epilogue

They beached the trawler on the eastern shore, not far from the experts’ compound. McIntyre was not lying about his seagoing heritage or exaggerating in the slightest his own skill at the wheel of a boat. He got them ashore in the surf without the riveted iron hull of the old craft breaking up underneath them. They were obliged by the trawler’s draught to wade through three or four feet of brine but the wind was behind them, propelling them towards land and their destination.

Walker told them where the others had gone and why. They came in pursuit on the quad bikes, roaring over the wet ground, Fortescue with Horan’s journal under his sweater against his chest.

Later, when Forescue had explained about the ritual, Lassiter thought he understood why the ghost of Jacob Parr had been so insistent that the journal be delivered personally. The written words had a talismanic power. They were the reason the trawler was able to get to the island without being attacked in the way that the rigid inflatable boat had been. The journal had been aboard the vessel and the words of the ritual, written at its conclusion, laid down there on the page, had protected them from harm.

It was only a theory. It came to him weeks after their departure from the island. He shared it with Paul Napier, his best man, at his wedding six months after the events on New Hope. He confided his theory moments before passing on Paul’s request to Alice that her bouquet be thrown accurately in the direction of Lucy Church.

Alice lost her psychic gift after Fortescue’s intervention. She plucked the journal from Jane’s incurious hands, where Fortescue had placed it. And Lassiter thought that her mind would be assaulted by images from the time of Ballantyne’s gruesome command of the slave ship Andromeda. It wasn’t, though. She had been right it seemed, in her conviction concerning the purpose of her gift. It was only ever endowed to help solve the mystery of what had happened to the vanished population of New Hope.

A police investigation into the disappearances of Cooper and the rest proved totally inconclusive; only serving to exonerate those that remained of any suspicion of involvement. Extracts from Horan’s journal were published with much fanfare in the Chronicle and, after concerted press and public lobbying the Vatican bowed to the pressure and released what details it had of Ballantyne’s practice on New Hope of human sacrifice.

But people have not really bought into the black magic explanation of events on the island. Conspiracy theorists still cling to the alien abduction argument. They reason that the disappearance of Karl Cooper lends conclusive weight to this explanation. They think he finally achieved his long-held ambition to make contact with the inhabitants of another galaxy.

Websites reinforcing this fallacy have been set up in honour of Cooper and Kale. They are viewed as fitting ambassadors for earth on other planets, heroes who will one day return to a triumphant reception from a world grateful for their diplomatic efforts on humanity’s behalf.

Were a poll to be taken in the average British pub, most of those casting votes would confidently agree that aliens were involved in both sets of New Hope disappearances. It just seems, to most people, more plausible than the darker and disturbing alternative. Human nature is optimistic. It seeks a happy ending. That’s why we’re attracted to the light.

Lillian Carrick moved in with the Chronicle’s editor, Marsden, three months after the island survivors limped into the port of Mallaig aboard McIntyre’s elderly tub of a fishing boat.

Stories of a whirlwind romance convinced none of the staff on the paper. Eventually the widow Carrick confessed that their affair had been going on for four years and she’d been on the verge of demanding a divorce. A lawyer had already been consulted by the time of her husband’s reluctant departure for New Hope.

McIntyre failed to see the funny side of this revelation. He sacked his editor. The Chronicle did not champion Victorian values in the manner of some of its more sanctimonious rival titles. But its proprietor, Karl Cooper apart, regarded himself as a shrewd judge of character. He had liked James Carrick and considered him a decent man deserving of a better domestic epitaph than the one allowed him by his faithless wife.

Those who survived the New Hope expedition are reluctant to discuss it and consistently vague on the detail. Philip Fortescue has attained a degree of academic notoriety for being the man who discovered the journal written by Thomas Horan. He’s become a popular talking head on more serious-minded TV programmes whenever maritime history or customs are discussed. Jane Chambers jokes that when they go out to dinner, her boyfriend is recognised in restaurants almost as often as she is.

Edith Chambers already calls him her wicked step-dad. Fortescue is young enough to understand that this is doubly a compliment. He is considering a job at the Greenwich Museum that would put him in closer proximity to Jane and her pushy, infuriating, adorable daughter. A pragmatic man most of the time, he would also like to put a few substantial miles between himself and the sea chest stored in the basement of the place where he currently works. It’s just a bit too close to him for comfort.

He could keep in touch with his roots. He still has the babe magnet car his brother sold him, when necessary, to get him back and forth to Liverpool.

He drove it over the Pennines to Barnsley a few weeks after returning from his sea voyage to New Hope. He had a promise to keep to an amateur historian there and remains a man always insistent on keeping his word.

He was not surprised at all to discover that the synopsis written by Emma Foot was thorough, well-organised and suggested her account of mining in the locality at the time of the Industrial Revolution would turn out to be an impressive piece of scholarship. He made a few suggestions. He further promised to look at the first draft of the book as soon as she’s completed it.

He has only the vaguest recollection of what happened in the windowless church. He cannot recall anything in detail about the appearance of the creature he confronted. He had faithfully learned the words of the ritual. He had prepared to recite them and he remembers feeling as much indignant, when he entered the darkness, as he was afraid. He was steeled for the confrontation.

But when he began to speak, his voice possessed a power and fluency not quite his own. And his body dictated movement to him over which he felt he had little if any control at all. It was as though his steps and gesticulations were somehow choreographed. There was a weird absence of self-will in this performance, almost suggestive of puppetry.

He chooses not to dwell on it, but suspects he was given crucial help from somewhere or more accurately, given help from someone, obliged to wait two remorseful centuries to be given the chance to offer it.

None of the survivors would ever return. The ritual invoked seemed to have the effect that Thomas Horan’s sorcerer had said it would, on the demon he brought into being and described as spite made flesh. But nothing was done about the spectre David Shanks shot with his cine camera there in 1934.

Everyone who has seen it thinks the film is genuine. None of them doubts that the child is a ghoulish doppelgänger of long-dead Rachel Ballantyne. No one can explain the spectre in any other, convincing way. The resemblance probably grows less acute as the years pass and take their physical toll on this restless apparition. But she is a baleful spirit and her antic ways would make the island an unnerving place on which to try to settle.

Wind howls through the empty New Hope settlement, even in the most innocent summer weather. The church without windows remains an unhappy construction. It was built in desperation for a bleak and bloody purpose. Around it, anguish seems to seep through the very stones of the dwellings that once housed the vanished community. It is a place as if in mourning for its own tormented passing. It seems not quite capable of peaceful repose. It is, somehow, unstill.

There is also the question of the crofter David Shanks. Or more pertinently, the vexed question of the place he built and for a short time, lived in. Passing boats have reported seeing lights on at night in the vicinity of his cottage. The island has no known inhabitants. The lights could be fishermen’s lanterns except that the surf is too high on the stretch of beach near the cottage for the casting of lines to be practical there. And what promise of a catch would tempt an angler to so remote and inhospitable a location?

Alexander McIntyre believes the island is entitled to keep its remaining mysteries unsolved. This is the view too of Paul Napier, who now heads up McIntyre’s security team. Chief Inspector Patrick Lassiter, invited by the Met to rejoin the force as part of its cold case review section, heartily agrees.

Lives were lost on the New Hope Island expedition and lives were rediscovered. For some it was a tragedy and for others a sort of rebirth. It was an experience that forged friendships and fostered romance and taught people much they did not know about themselves. But none of those who lived through it all would ever dream of going back there.

Dark Resurrection

F. G. Cottam

Chapter One

The police officer was young, dark, swarthy and not bad looking. He wore a suit rather than a uniform, which made him a detective. He’d travelled all the way from Scotland to interview her and spoke with a soft Highland accent. Ruthie wasn’t nervous. As far as she was aware, she’d done nothing wrong. He’d met her outside the Minghella ice-cream parlour on Ventnor’s sea-front, so she was the one on home ground.

‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ she asked.

‘It’s your funeral.’

‘We all die of something.’

‘I’ve never seen the point in deliberately accelerating the process though,’ he said, blinking at the bright sky. ‘This is a lovely spot.’

She lit her cigarette with a Bic lighter. She inhaled deeply, expelled smoke in twin plumes out of her nostrils and said, ‘Ask away.’

‘You booked to participate in the writer-retreat fortnight held on New Hope Island. The recent trip organised by Dennis Thorpe?’

‘Guilty as charged,’ she said, ‘I did.’

‘But you pulled out at the last moment. I’d like to know why.’

She thought about the question. She smoked and sipped coffee. She said, ‘Honest answer?’

‘You’d be wasting my time with anything else.’

‘I began to have doubts about Thorpe. Something about him didn’t seem quite right. He’d set up the New Hope thing with some Arts Council funding he had to spend within a deadline or lose access to. Or so he said. The whole thing seemed a bit rushed and half-arsed, to be honest. I didn’t think we’d be getting what was promised in the brochure.’

‘I haven’t seen the brochure.’

‘Figure of speech,’ Ruthie said. ‘Don’t mean an actual brochure.’

The Scottish police officer nodded. His name was Nick McClain and as Ruthie had correctly deduced, he was a detective sergeant.

‘Thorpe hasn’t had anything new published for about five years,’ Ruthie said. ‘I reckoned he was blocked and seeing the New Hope thing as a way to get unblocked. You go off on a writers’ retreat and you want your fellow writers calm and collected, in my view. I got the feeling though that Dennis Thorpe was pretty anxious. He didn’t seem relaxed at all.’

‘Had you any specific thoughts about any of the others?’

Ruthie shrugged. She scrabbled out her cigarette in the ashtray on their table. ‘Wannabes,’ she said, ‘all of them. I imagined that the tales swapped around the campfire at night would’ve been depressingly second-rate. It just didn’t live up to the billing, when I had a serious think about it, so I pulled out and lost my hundred quid deposit. I felt quite relieved, really, once I’d done that. It would’ve been an awfully long way to go to waste a fortnight of my life when I got there. And it would’ve been a bloody long way to come back from if I’d opted to leave early. Why is this of interest to the police?’

‘We have to follow every line of inquiry. Your cancellation seemed anomalous.’

Ruthie thought about this. ‘Anomalous how?’

McClain smiled. He said, ‘A bit like when airline passengers are no-shows for a flight where the aircraft subsequently crashes.’

‘I didn’t have a premonition of doom,’ Ruthie said, ‘if that’s what you’re thinking. Should I have?’

‘They’ve disappeared,’ McClain said. ‘The entire group has vanished suddenly and without trace, something I’m going to have to insist you keep to yourself for the present.’

‘Until you find them, or find out what’s happened to them.’

‘That’s my objective.’

‘When did they disappear?’

‘Their abandoned camp was discovered three days ago.’

‘Which means you don’t know, precisely. Are you following any leads?’

‘We’ve established the usual lines of inquiry.’

‘So you haven’t a clue. Bloody hell.’

McClain smiled uncomfortably. He said, ‘Fairer to say we’ve no hard evidence, yet.’

‘It’s not the first time, is it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘In police-speak, New Hope’s got a bit of form when it comes to people vanishing. Didn’t a whole community of people disappear from there a hundred years ago, some kind of religious cult?’

‘Nearer to two hundred years ago,’ he said. ‘An expedition attempted to solve that particular mystery about six years back. Some of them disappeared too. Ring any bells?’

She shook her head. ‘Dennis Thorpe didn’t dwell on New Hope’s reputation. He was sold on the solitude of the island, talked all this flowery crap about the creative expanses our imaginations could explore in its isolation.’

‘Desolation, would be a better description,’ McClain said.

Ruthie smiled. She lit another cigarette. She said, ‘That word definitely didn’t figure in Thorpe’s brochure.’

‘It should have.’

‘You say that with feeling.’

He looked at her directly. He had pale blue eyes, with an attractive transparency. They were arresting eyes, she thought, thinking that only appropriate, given his job.

‘I’ve been there,’ McClain said. ‘Desolate is how it makes you feel. And I was there for only six or seven hours, in daylight.’

‘You’ve come an awful long way, detective sergeant,’ she said, ‘to see me.’

‘It’s Nick,’ he said.

‘Then it’s Ruthie.’

‘You’re the nearest thing we’ve got to a witness, Ruthie.’

‘I never got nearer to New Hope than London.’

‘Where you attended both of the seminars Thorpe organised.’

She wrinkled her nose remembering, thinking that Dennis Thorpe had been full of shit. She said, ‘The first meeting was an induction, a potted history of the island, some stuff about its climate and the general grandeur and remoteness of the Outer Hebrides. There was an inventory of the equipment we were meant to take. The experience was going to be pretty basic, alpine tents for accommodation. Not the log cabins with wood-burning stoves I’d assumed we’d get for the money we were paying. It was all a bit survivalist for me.’

‘You don’t really come across as the nature-trail type.’

‘I don’t mind a picturesque walk. I don’t mind pedalling a few miles on a mountain bike. But I wouldn’t fancy running out of water and drinking my own pee.’

‘Yet you attended the second seminar?’

‘I write paranormal fiction. I write for children and dabble in young adult. I’m sure you know that, though. I want to write more grown-up stuff and thought the island might inspire me. I’d heard the story of the cine film David Shanks shot there in the 1930s.’

McCain winced.

‘Oh, my God,’ Ruthie said. ‘You’ve seen it, haven’t you?’

‘Yesterday,’ he said.

‘Well?’

‘To me it looked genuine.’

‘Fuck! I mean, gosh!’

‘Tell me about the second seminar.’ She sensed his desire to move away from the subject of the cine film. No wonder, given the rumours she’d heard about it.

‘That was when the retreaters were meant to get to know one another. We’d been told to prepare a short description of our own personalities and literary tastes and aspirations with a summary at the end of what we hoped to get out of the New Hope experience. Thorpe arranged for us to all meet in a pub. It was the Flask in Hampstead Village. I got there early and was a bit pissed by the end of the evening.’

‘Great.’

‘I said a bit pissed by the end of it, not rolling drunk at the start. I can still tell you what you want to know.’

‘Without me telling you what that is?’

‘You want to know whether anyone there struck me as the sort of homicidal nutter who might massacre everyone else before topping themselves when they got to New Hope. That’s it, isn’t it?’

McClain laughed. ‘More or less in a nutshell,’ he said.

Ruthie smoked and thought, looking out across the road beyond the seafront and the pebbled beach, to the sea itself, green and glittery in the sunshine. She said, ‘There were six of them, seven including Thorpe. I remember thinking they’d have trouble just erecting tents, never mind living in them. They were none of them what you’d call physical people. None of the group was robust enough to carry out a mass slaughter.’

‘You’d be surprised at what people are capable of.’

‘I haven’t led what you’d call a sheltered life, Nick.’

‘I’m not accusing you of being naïve. I’m simply stating a fact.’

After a pause, Ruthie said, ‘None of them appeared to have an agenda beyond the obvious. They were after inspiration. They wanted to be energised and more focused. They wanted to be better writers. That’s why they were going and why they were all so excited about going.’

From his pocket, McClain took a piece of paper he unfolded and smoothed out on their table. It was a list of the names of the New Hope retreaters, with Thorpe’s at its head. He said, ‘I’d like you to tell me everything you remember about each of these people. I want to know about mannerisms, tics, conversational style and substance, appearance, tastes, opinions, everything.’

‘I only met them twice, for a total time of about five hours.’

‘I only sat down with you a few minutes ago. I already know you’re confident but not at all conceited. You’re honest to the point of sometimes being blunt. You don’t feel any pressure to please people for the sake of it, which is quite rare because most people like to be liked. You’re wearing Calvin Klein Eternity perfume. I’d say your main extravagance, though, is your hair, which is quite beautifully and recently cut. You don’t spend a lot on clothes.’

‘Cheers,’ Ruthie said.

‘No offence intended.’

‘You’re a trained investigator,’ she said, ‘which is just as well, because you’ve no future as a diplomat.’

He raised his eyebrows in amusement, before continuing. ‘I don’t yet know whether the ink is a lifestyle statement or a trespass warning but the lily didn’t need any gilding, I can assure you of that.’

Ruthie just shrugged.

‘The tattoos are exquisitely done by the way, if you like that sort of thing.’

‘Evidently I do.’

‘It’s true I’m trained, but you’re a fiction writer, so you’re observant and you’re curious. You’re obviously clever and the memory is fresh because you met these people less than a month ago. Talk to me, Ruthie. Tell me about them.’

She smiled. She said, ‘I’ll tell you everything I can, if you tell me about the Shanks cine film. It’s a quid-pro-quo.’

‘You won’t thank me.’

‘It’s like the title of that old song, you get what you give.’

‘The New Radicals,’ McClain said. ‘I’d have thought someone who looks like you would be more into Siouxsie and the Banshees or Bauhaus.’

She lifted her eyes to the sky in exasperation. ‘Bauhaus split up the year I was born, Nick. And don’t try to deflect me with your prowess at pop trivia.’

‘1983,’ he said

‘Quid-pro-quo,’ she said again.

‘You’re like a dog with a bone,’ he said.

‘I haven’t got the bone yet. And it’s never a good idea to compare a woman to a dog.’

It was McClain’s turn to gaze out over the sea. He didn’t say anything for a pause of several seconds and then he looked her directly in the eye and said, ‘You’ve got a deal.’

‘Good.’

‘Provided you have dinner with me tonight, assuming you’re free?

‘Are you coming on to me, on duty, on the tax-payer’s time and money?’

‘No, I’m not. Talking now will make you remember something later on, that’s how the mind works. It might be something significant. It would be good if I was actually there when whatever it is comes back to you. I can give you my number and you could call me, but face to face is always preferable and my journey back isn’t till the morning.’

‘Are you married or single?’

‘I’m recently divorced.’

‘Hmm.’

His cheeks coloured slightly. He said, ‘I’ve already admitted to finding you attractive. But it would be totally unethical for me to attempt to engineer anything beyond professional contact.’

‘Tell me about the cine film,’ she said.

‘You’re very persistent.’

‘I don’t think that’s necessarily a vice,’ she said. ‘Tell me about it.’

‘It’s not relevant to the investigation.’

‘Then why did you source and view it?’

‘Sometimes the past informs the present. What’s your interest?’

‘Matters paranormal intrigue me. But you knew that.’

‘I’ll tell you about it tonight,’ McClain said. ‘We’ll discuss it when I’m permitted something stronger than coffee to drink.’

‘I’m an authority on strong drink,’ Ruthie said. She smiled dubiously and folded her arms across her chest. ‘It’s one of my areas of expertise, years of diligent research. I’ll meet you at the Spyglass Inn at seven o’clock.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now before you go, tell me about Dennis Thorpe and his merry band of aspiring authors.’

‘They weren’t particularly merry,’ she said, unfolding her arms again, leaning back in her chair, frowning slightly and recalling them, ‘four woman and two men. We’ll do ladies first.’

The friendliest of the retreat women was a vicar from Sussex, the Reverend Mabel Farrow. Ruthie put her age at about 35, an unimportant detail because of course the detective sergeant knew exactly how old Mabel was. She had a passion for all things Jane Austen and aspired to write an Aga saga with a clergywoman heroine. Mabel had begun a weekly writing group which met at her own church hall. She’d written a few short stories and these had been enthused over by the group, obviously Ruthie said, because they all wanted to go to heaven. She hadn’t got beyond the ten-page outline of her book.

The least friendly of the women was mid-40s Customs Officer Jennifer Spring, who despite her own surname and Thorpe’s best efforts, Ruthie told McClain, never really thawed. Her eyes bored into yours with the cold promise of interviews conducted under caution and strip-searches done wearing snappy latex gloves.

‘Ill-tempered?’ McClain asked, ‘A woman who found it difficult to empathise, or conceal her basic hostility to other people?’

Ruthie thought about this, about Jennifer Spring. ‘I think more a case of struggling with severe shyness. And she wanted to write espionage fiction and for whatever reason it was an ambition she appeared to feel slightly embarrassed about.’

The two women retreaters occupying the nondescript centre-ground were Debbie Carter and Suzie Ford, probably both in their late 30s. They were both married with pre-teen children and were looking forward to the trip with a strange mix of excitement at the potential for personal fulfilment, and dread at how much, as mothers, they were going to miss their kids while away. Debbie aspired to write what she called Dark Romance. Ruthie assumed this meant Mills and Boon with a bit of light bondage. Suzie wanted to write crime novels.

‘Christ,’ Ruthie said, remembering the zeal brightening their faces as Thorpe blathered on about New Hope Island’s stark majesty, ‘I hope they’re found okay.’

‘Tell me about the men,’ McClain said. He obviously wanted to extract as much information from her as possible before any emotion hit.

The male retreaters were William Thompson and Freddie Boyle. William — definitely not a Bill — was a merchant banker with a prestigious job in the Square Mile and a long-held ambition to write historical novels set in the Napoleonic era and all featuring the same group of core characters on whom he’d done quite a bit of preparatory work. Real events would provide his plots but he was nervous about actually starting.

‘He was in his fifties, I’d say, and his fear of failure, in someone so successful, was a real obstacle.’

‘Would you call this nervousness acute?’

‘Yes, I would.’

‘Interesting.’

‘He didn’t strike me as a mass-killer,’ Ruthie said, ‘just a senior executive who was good with figures, dubious about stepping out of his comfort zone.’

‘And Freddie Boyle?’

‘Definitely the most colourful of the group,’ she said. ‘He’d been a tabloid reporter all his working life until the internet made him obsolete and he got laid off. He said he’d worked for the same newspaper group for more than 40 years and hinted at a generous redundancy pay-out.’

‘What did he want to write?’

‘You’d assume pulp-fiction looking at him and listening to his newsroom war stories. He’d been a crime reporter and he’d seen and heard it all.’

‘Assuming he was to be believed.’

‘I believed him. But he wanted to write a children’s book, about a bullied boy who overcomes his oppressors and his fears. He wanted to write something that would not just entertain, but do some good.’

Ruthie shivered.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I’m talking about them all in the past tense. That’s only natural, but it also seems a bit morbid and final. They were just normal people, painfully normal really. I only hope they’re all okay.’

‘You’ve sketched out the group. Now tell me about the retreaters’ leader. Tell me about Dennis Thorpe.’

‘I didn’t like him.’

‘I’ve gathered that.’

‘He was the principle reason I didn’t go.’

Ruthie left their pavement table with its ashtray clogged and her stomach bilious from too much coffee about 20 minutes later. She got to her cottage home and brushed her teeth and resolved for probably the hundredth time that year to give up smoking. It was June and she thought a hundred broken resolutions probably par for her personal course. It was almost the longest day, the summer equinox. A year went nowhere, did it, these days?

She’d wondered how the clever detective sergeant had known she was single. To some astute people someone youngish and unattached probably wore their failure to find romantic fulfilment like a badge. Was she youngish? Her reflection still insisted emphatically that she was. She was 33. But it was a question really of perspective. On a maternity ward in a hospital, her age in years would categorise her as elderly.

She took a shower and changed and then tried to settle down to some work. She was just over halfway through writing a pre-teen novel she was supposed to complete by the beginning of August. She’d had plenty of momentum with it so far, was pleased with what she’d done, and knew where the story was going and how it was going to get there. She was slightly stressed, as she always was at this stage because if it ran out of steam now she’d have wasted weeks of her life and thousands of words of work. This hadn’t happened to her so far, but she always felt that underlying edginess until the final sentence was completed on the last page. She was, though, a long way short of panic.

This was just as well, because she found that afternoon that she couldn’t work at all. Instead she thought about the New Hope Island retreaters and specifically about their leader, Dennis Thorpe, a glib and handsome 34 year old with a well-established reputation as a successful writer of paranormal fiction and someone she’d thought was hiding something significant from the world.

He’d written five novels, one a year from his best-selling debut at the age of 24 and she’d read and enjoyed all of them. The final book had been set on a fictional island very similar to the factual location of New Hope. It had centred on an itinerant soldier of fortune turned bohemian writer and recluse. He was trying to make a living as a crofter as the only inhabitant of the island and as such bore a strong resemblance to the real-life New Hope settler David Shanks.

Shanks had been turned into a rebel and iconoclast by what he’d witnessed on the Western Front in the Great War. It was totally in character for him not to be intimidated by the island’s history. The enduring mystery of what had happened to Seamus Ballantyne’s Kingdom of Belief almost two centuries earlier was of no material concern to him. He’d wanted to settle somewhere otherwise uninhabited. He’d built a one-room cottage on New Hope. But then things must have taken a turn for the weird.

He’d been confronted by an occult presence that famously, he’d managed to catch on cine film. But the film had been out of the public domain for more than 70 years. And most of the people who’d viewed it in the 1930s had thought it faked. Shanks in life had fled New Hope after seeing this apparition. In Thorpe’s novel, his protagonist was instead tormented by the drowned crew of a wrecked fishing vessel. But he didn’t run. He held out. The haunting stopped when he hammered together a driftwood monument on the island’s highest promontory to acknowledge and commemorate their deaths. Unburied, that tribute gave their spirits rest.

Thorpe’s lonely and ghost-plagued hero hammered the last nail into his memorial as dusk descended. Then he went back to his one-room cottage at the island’s western extremity to see if he’d finally be left alone. It was the closing chapter of the book, rich with tension and dread, and Thorpe had written nothing better and since then, nothing at all.

Well, writers got blocked. It happened to the best of them. Except that Ruthie now suspected there was more to it with Dennis Thorpe and that some secret agenda informed his whole New Hope project. It had been haphazard and badly thought-out because it was only the cover for something.

Thorpe had an ulterior motive in going to the island. He’d make a good few quid out of the exercise personally, but the motive wasn’t profit. The retreat guaranteed him company. The creative potential of his retreaters didn’t matter a damn to him. He had business of some private and secret nature on New Hope, but he didn’t want to be there on his own.

‘He didn’t dare,’ Ruthie said to herself, thinking how good a gin and tonic would taste, if she wasn’t observing her strict six-o’clock rule. She looked at the wristwatch she’d put on after her shower. It was only just after three. She went to the fridge and poured herself a glass of Chablis. It was deliciously cold and crisp and in Ruthie’s world, white wine didn’t really qualify as an alcoholic drink.

Her drinking was a matter of complex checks and balances, dense equations, trade-offs debated fiercely behind closed doors in the conference room of her mind. At her most objective about herself, Ruthie knew that she fretted about drinking much more than she actually drank. She considered pubs cheerful places but generally preferred their jolly atmosphere to any seriously heavy patronage of the products they sold.

Just occasionally, she did go to the dogs. There was always more of the spontaneous than the desperate about these infrequent lapses. They were always in pursuit of a good time and never a sad quest in search of oblivion. Alcohol for her was never a crutch, always a springboard and the purpose of a springboard was to enable you to bounce. But she felt this tendency to sometimes over-indulge made her someone sometimes slightly less than totally reliable.

DS Nick McClain sat in his hotel room with his eyes trained vacantly on the pretty seascape through the window and his mind focused wholly on the enigmatic history of New Hope Island.

Seamus Ballantyne was the master of a slave vessel who repented, according to the legend, quite suddenly on the cobbled quayside of his native city of Liverpool. He became a hellfire preacher and eventually founded the Colony he led on what he christened New Hope Island in the 1820s. He never explained why he chose the Outer Hebrides, too much the demagogue for his acolytes to query the decision. He singled out an isolated rock on a maritime chart. They simply followed his charismatic lead.

At first this community, this self-styled Kingdom of Belief, prospered. The Colony traded the wool it gathered and the whisky it distilled with merchants from the mainland. And it was one of these, a dozen years after the Colony’s establishment, who went there and discovered that the entire population of about 140 souls had simply vanished without trace.

The New Hope Island disappearance was a mystery to rival the enigma of the Marie Celeste. And in 2010, when he needed a circulation boost for his ailing flagship title, media mogul Alexander McIntyre had come up with the ruse of financing an expedition made up of experts who would finally and definitively solve it.

One of those experts had been a detective named Patrick Lassiter. A losing battle with alcohol had forced him to resign his CID post and at the time of the expedition, he was a private investigator on McIntyre’s payroll.

Now he was back on the Force, his demons beaten and happily married to an eminent and rather glamorous psychiatrist. At least, DS McClain thought she was glamorous, going through some of the notes in his case file in his room at a hotel in Ventnor, perusing her head-and-shoulders shot.

‘You’re a lucky man,’ he said, studying Lassiter’s picture, aware that he now held the exalted rank of Commander and headed up the Cold Case Division at New Scotland Yard. He was good as well as lucky, having sustained a conviction rate throughout his police career few officers could ever come close to achieving. It was four o’clock, the time scheduled for their pre-arranged conversation and McClain felt more nervous than he’d felt since being a lowly probationer as he called the direct line he’d been given.

‘It’s DS McClain, Commander, of Western Isles Area Command?’

‘You’re punctual, Detective Sergeant. How’s your witness?’

‘Bright, precise and cooperating fully.’

‘She’s an extremely fortune young woman.’

‘From which I take it you think they’re dead.’

‘The island’s got form.’

‘Funny, she said the same thing.’

‘There’s nothing funny about New Hope. It’s a hazardous place.’

McClain sensed some ambiguity there. He said, ‘Naturally hazardous?’

‘I’d say inherently so.’

‘I’ve thought about that; about rip-tides and exposure and sea-fog and rogue waves and hypothermia and all the rest. And none of it explains how seven people can just vanish without a corpse or any other shred of forensic evidence or sign of a struggle. It’s baffling.’

Quietly, Commander Lassiter said, ‘Are you recording this?’

‘No, Sir. I’m not.’

‘You’ve viewed the Shanks footage?’

‘You wouldn’t believe the strings we had to pull to get access to that, Commander. It was barely in our hands for half an hour. I saw it yesterday.’

‘What was your personal conclusion?’

‘It was impossible, so it was terrifying, because I couldn’t help thinking it was genuine.’

‘I know the provenance of the film because I’m the man who tracked it down, back when I was working as a private eye hired by McIntyre. Frankly that was a low, dark time in my life. I’d sunk further than I’d ever imagined or feared was possible.’

‘But you still had your knack for detection.’

‘Shanks had a son, who’d died of cancer in late middle-age while resident in a care home. His death occurred two years before the McIntyre expedition. The home had one of those odd-job staffers who ran it as a personal fiefdom.’

‘The sort who helps himself to the booty of the dearly-departed, you mean.’

‘The son had no dependents. His good stuff had gone to auction and the tat to a local junk shop. The film can was still gathering dust there on a shelf where I found it in 2010. David Shanks had labeled it and it hadn’t been opened in decades, I don’t think.’

‘So you think it’s genuine too?’

Lassiter was silent for a long moment. Then he said, ‘What I think is that New Hope Island is a bad place. It’s a malevolent place. What I think is that you won’t find the people you’re looking for alive. In fact I don’t think you’ll find them at all.’

‘And you’ve been there,’ McClain said.

‘Yes, my lad,’ Lassiter said. ‘God help me, I have.’

‘I’m grateful for your input, Commander.’

‘That’s an extravagant term for a bit of background, detective-sergeant, but please feel free to keep in touch.’

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Table of Contents

- Title Page
- About the Author
- Also By F. G. Cottam

- The Colony – F. G. Cottam

- Copyright
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16
- Chapter 17
- Chapter 18
- Chapter 19
- Chapter 20
- Chapter 21
- Chapter 22
- Chapter 23
- Epilogue

- Dark Resurrection – F. G. Cottam

- Chapter 1

- Love F. G. Cottam?