Part 4 (2/2)

'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 plat.i.tudes 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.

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.

A breakthrough such as she thought New Hope Island might offer would not exactly make her indispensible to her day to day employers, but it almost would. And it would place her at the front of the queue of medically qualified presenters when new TV programme ideas were being pitched. It was not a case of ego, but of necessity. There were times when a woman had to do what a woman had to do and for Jane, this was one of them.

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. Smiling and increasingly prolific, she thought, folding the paper and consigning it to a rubbish bin without further study of the piece. She knew all she ever wanted to know about Karl Cooper. Her confrontation with Edith was going to make the day painful enough without exposing herself again to past emotional bruises.

She had failed in her relations.h.i.+ps 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.

Edith was 14 now. Jane had given birth to her too young. She had only been 18, practically a child herself. She had married. She had continued with her education. Her parents-in-law had seen more of her daughter than she had in those early years of Edith's infancy. Her father, Michael, had been reduced to the role of a house husband during the first, hectic, burgeoning years of Jane's professional success. And then six years ago he had packed his bags and left. And then when she reached eleven, as soon as it did not seem actually to construe an act of child cruelty, Jane had despatched Edith off to school.

A failed wife and a neglectful mother reminded of her own gullibility in love prior to setting out to break her daughter's heart over a summer of callous abandonment. It was fair to say that Jane was not having one of her best mornings. She was wondering what else could possibly go wrong when she was pulled over by a police patrol car for doing 40 in a 30 mile an hour zone.

She could have wept. But the officer driving the car recognised her from the telly and asked her for an autograph and gave her only a telling off pitched between sternness and flirtation. She tried to tell herself this reprieve was the start of better things, but then drove the remainder of the journey cautiously and with a heavy heart at how she thought Edith was likely to react to the news of her plans for the summer.

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. She considered the school's pastoral arm an unnecessary concession to political correctness. 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.

The school was neo-Gothic, set in grounds that sumptuously reflected the fees paid by the parents of the pupils there. Raked gravel crunched under Jane's tyres along the neat drive stretching from the pillared and gated main entrance. 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 b.u.mps 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 c.u.mbrian 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 alb.u.m of the singer's favourite songs, ent.i.tled 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 a.s.sure 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 b.u.mps were still p.r.i.c.kling 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 La.s.siter feeling slightly grubby. He did not feel his professional integrity compromised by the first cla.s.s 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. It made sense for him to arrive un-rumpled and free of fatigue and be comfortably berthed once there. That was just McIntyre trying to ensure he got the best from the man he was employing.

What did it, what left him feeling less than wholly honest, was what McIntyre termed the oiling of the wheels. In his past life, La.s.siter's warrant card had given him access to the places to which it was sometimes difficult to gain entry. Now, McIntyre's money and his influence were doing that.

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. La.s.siter'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.

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