The Colony (21 page)

‘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. She’d noted Carrick’s apparent hostility towards Jane Chambers. But she didn’t think it would be anything to worry about on the trip.

She let her mind drift off, on to the subject of Alice Lang, the psychiatrist and psychic she was scheduled to interview that afternoon. Alice had the lowest public profile of any of the experts going to New Hope. That would remain the case, even if Degrelle could be persuaded to join them. He was controversial, even notorious in agnostic circles. She by contrast was barely known to the public at all.

But despite her lack of celebrity status, Lucy thought Alice Lang potentially the most interesting of all the people going to New Hope. She used her powers, more accurately her gift, only with the greatest reluctance. The time spent on the island would either be a waste of time for her, or it would be a traumatic ordeal. She wasn’t hungry for fame and she didn’t profit from her psychic sensitivity. It begged the question, why was she going there at all?

It was 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.

Conference was breaking up. The need to orchestrate Degrelle’s involvement was urgent and Marsden would not delegate the task. It occurred to her that Carrick must have been dwelling on the expedition at home for the priestly omission to have occurred to him. And it occurred to her for the first time that her department head might not actually be overjoyed at the idea of being flown to a remote Scottish island for the duration.

He had a young family, didn’t he? He had a wife and two daughters under the age of ten. Perhaps he had been dwelling on the trip at home because it was something he was not so much looking forward to, as dreading. It was okay for her, a young woman, professional and unattached. For a family man, it would seem like nothing short of a brutal exile from all the things he valued in life.

His barb about Jane Chambers had reminded her of the trouble Jane was having with her daughter. Or more accurately, the trouble Jane’s daughter was having when she dreamed. She dreamed of a man who had served aboard Seamus Ballantyne’s slave ship. It was odd. More than that, it was ominous. Jane had been so worried that she’d felt the need to confide in her about it.

Lucy still felt flattered by that. She couldn’t have written anything for the Chronicle about Edith’s dreams concerning Jacob Parr. Child protection legislation would have prevented the paper from printing it. And it would have been self-defeating because it would have alienated Jane and the expedition would have lost the nation’s best-known virologist. But she still felt flattered.

Jane was not the serene and glamorous celebrity scientist people assumed she was. She was a complicated and in some ways quite vulnerable woman. She was a caring mother who competed at the sharp end of the medical profession. She seemed a bit lonely. Lucy liked her and admired her and thought they were on the way to establishing a friendship that would flourish in exile, on the island. She decided that she would call Jane.

First, out of nothing more than a reporter’s instinct she switched on her desktop and looked at the cuttings from the period of Jane Chambers’ brief affair with Karl Cooper.

They’d met on a judging panel. There was a still shot of the four member panel and they’d been seated side by side at its centre. In the picture, he was saying something to her out of the side of his mouth and she was smiling at whatever it was and they were leaning in collusively. The body language suggested a strong and easy mutual attraction. The panel had been judging student inventions over a six week season and so there had been plenty of opportunity for the relationship to flourish.

And flourish it had. There was another picture of them, attending the Chelsea Flower Show together, this time hand in hand. The smiles were broad and, terrible pun that it was, Jane was blooming in the sunshine in a pale silk dress and a broad brimmed hat. In his linen suit and sunglasses, with his hair dishevelled by the summer breeze, the nation’s favourite cosmologist looked more like a movie star.

Then it all went wrong. There was a picture of a papped Cooper, picking up his morning paper from the mat, unshaven and surly. There was a flash shot of Jane, pale and drawn in sunglasses at the wheel of her car at night. And there was the usual guff about conflicting schedules, professional commitments and the inevitability of growing apart whist sharing a deep and enduring respect and affection for one another. Yeah, right, Lucy thought. She brought up Jane’s number on her cell phone and made the 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 discrete buyer somewhere for Ballantyne’s Breguet.

Elizabeth Burrows had lived in a hall of residence in Bootle. She’d killed herself in the autumn of 1971. There would have been a post-mortem. Drugs had been ubiquitous at that time among students, even more so then that they were now. They had possessed a cache then; they were a rebellious lifestyle statement, taking them a pre-requisite if you were a part of the counter-culture and hostile to the status quo and the Establishment.

The college authorities and presumably her parents would have wanted to know whether she took her life under the influence of LSD or cannabis or amphetamines. Her body would have been tested for drugs and her room would have been searched and the contents duly listed. Even 40 years ago, the Merseyside force would have been diligent and professional in dealing with the violent death of a young woman.

Lassiter paced the carpet of Alice Lang’s sitting room. They had been more or less living under her roof since that 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.