Part 2 (2/2)

'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.'

La.s.siter 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 s.p.a.ce 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 changed her mind concerning the wisdom of saying anything at all.

'What?' He said.He smiled. 'The truth will out, Alice.'

'You need to take better care of yourself, Patrick. You were a very good detective. You were also quite a decent human being. You still are. Try to remember that.It would do no harm to remind yourself of the fact from time to time.'

He walked back to his car shaken by her insights and flattered by her concern in equal measure. Was the booze habit really so obvious? He knew he had been a good detective. Sometimes he would take out his commendations and read the citations and recall the cases in which he had earned them. It was one of his delaying tactics in the evenings when the thirst came upon him and he craved a drink before the appointed hour.

He had not mentioned to her how accident p.r.o.ne his home had become since he had first viewed the film. If there was an unwelcome presence in the flat, he thought that she would be aware of that straight away. She would pick up on its hostility. Why had he bothered to suggest the film might after all be faked, when both of them had emphatically known it wasn't? He could kid himself that he was just following procedure, allowing the most plausible possibility until it was disproven. But it had actually been simpler than that. It had been wishful thinking.

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 ma.s.s 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.

There was no real evidence to support any of these explanations. The forensic evidence, or rather the total lack of it, suggested most the mad notion that the community had been whisked off into s.p.a.ce by aliens.

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 cla.s.sroom of seven and eight year olds all just peris.h.i.+ng 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 ma.s.sive airtime in Scotland, of course.

Everyone on rival t.i.tles wanted a few live quotes from Alexander McIntyre. But he was not going to do any favours for competing media and wasn't going to pre-empt what they would write in tomorrow's edition as the countdown gathered pace. He had given one written quote and that was going to be that. He was quoted as saying that of course he was going personally and that he was going with an open mind and looking forward very much to getting there.

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 a.s.sets 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 h.e.l.lfire 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 cus.h.i.+ons 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.

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