Part 2 (1/2)

La.s.siter 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 a.s.sistance. 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 psychiatristwho 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. La.s.siter 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 pa.s.senger 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 Two.

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 s.p.a.ce travel. These men had both been employed in the boom years of the Apollo missions and had plenty to say in their retirement about the real att.i.tude of the men behind the s.p.a.ce programme to the possibility of alien life. Far likelier than not, was their conclusion. And there were cla.s.sified reports, they hinted, to back the likelihood up.

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 a.s.sumed 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 s.p.a.cecraft. 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 s.h.i.+p 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 vanis.h.i.+ng. 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 pract.i.tioner. 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 appet.i.te 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 vanis.h.i.+ng 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 La.s.siter 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 La.s.siter had been a b.l.o.o.d.y good copper. And La.s.siter, 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. His instinct told him that the paper and the health of the paper should really be the main beneficiary of the New Hope expedition. Circulation had fallen. The stature of newspapers as breakers of news had been undermined by the internet perhaps, in the long run, fatally. The paper's website scored considerably more hits than copies sold and his company's web ventures were increasingly important sources of revenue stream and bottom line profit.

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 fas.h.i.+oned 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 civilizations 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 La.s.siter 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 who 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 ent.i.tled to do so, La.s.siter 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,' La.s.siter 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 bra.s.s door knocker. And that was when I knew.'

La.s.siter 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?'

La.s.siter 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.'